Province Knew What Omicron Could Do in Early December, & Delayed

Jeff Green | Jan 19, 2022

It is very very rare for us out here in the rural backwaters of Eastern Ontario to have any real idea what goes on in the back rooms of Queen's Park.

Decisions that are made in those back rooms have an impact on our lives, to be sure, but our interests are not generally considered at all when those decisions are made. And as far as we are from the halls of power, the decisions made in Toronto might as well be made on the moon, as far as we are concerned.

Where the latest COVID wave is concerned, we have more direct information, inferential to be sure, but direct nonetheless, about what the government knew and when.

And that tells us that they were still permitting shopping malls to be full and encouraging people to invite 25 sundry relatives to Christmas dinner weeks after they knew that the Omicron wave was upon us.

Because the Omicron wave started in Kingston in November and spread quickly to bedroom communities in South Frontenac and Loyalist township, the media in our region were regularly informed about how it changed everything about the way COVID was spreading. By early December we knew that cases were so widespread that contact tracing was no longer viable and the testing system could not keep up with demand.

As Kingston Frontenac Lennox and Addingto Public Health (KFLAPH) were faced with quickly develkoping public health orders to combat the spread in the face of silence from Public Health Ontario, Dr. Oglaza said that he was not working in a vaccuum, and Public Health Ontario was providing support.

Indeed, the measures that were taken locally all ended up being consistent with measures later taken provincially. As we all know, Dr. Oglaza's predecessor at KFLAPH, Dr. Kieran Moore, heads up Public Health Ontario.

By mid-December, Dr. Oglaza said that everyone who is not vaccinated agains COVID in KFL&A can expect to contract the virus '”by the end of January”.

Given what we know about how well versed Dr. Moore is in epidemiological data and the way COVID spreads under any and all circumstances, it is inconceivable that he, and Public Health Ontario, did not know in early December that the only way to slow down Omicron was to do decrease social interactions.

In our region, we did not need wait for restaurants to be closed down by the province. Restuarants began closing voluntarily, for safety and commercial regions. Our communities shut down, and the consequence is that our hospitals have not been overrun by Omicron.

On Monday, December 13, the situation was so clear that we ran the following assertion in an early morning online article “the Omicron wave will certainly have washed over our region and extended across Ontario well before the booster program can stop it.”

At that time, booster shots for people between 18 and 40 over were not scheduled to commence until January 4th.

Later that same day, Peter Juni, of the Ontario science table said on CBC radio that “we cannot vaccinate ourselves out of Omicron. It is spreading too rapidly. This is not modelling, this is math.”

The clear implication for Juni was that only social distancing would make a difference, and he also said that during that interview. In fact, he used the interview to openly lobby for fresh restrictions to be imposed.

It took four more days for Public Health Ontario to restrict indoor gatherings to ten people and restrict shopping malls to 50% of capacity, which took effect on December 19th

And it was not until January 4th, that more extensive social restrictions were imposed in Ontario, after the Christmas season was over.

And two weeks later, the hospitalisation rate and icu rate across the province has finally stopped growing after a month of daily increases.

Before the first Canadian COVID case, DR. Kieran Moore pulled restaurant inspectors from their regular work, and sent them to long term care facilities to make sure they were living up to existing regulations and new ones that were imposed when COVID actually arrived.

Dr. Moore knew that COVID-19 was going to hit residents of long-term care homes first and hardest.

He knew the data and he was able to correctly analyze the implications.

It is very hard, impossible in fact, to believe that he did not know what the impact of the Omicron variant was going to be in Ontario by the first week of December.

Yet it took three weeks for Public Health Ontario to introduce significant measures and fully 5 weeks before the Ontario government imposed the kind of measures that Peter Yuni was calling for on December 13.

The only conclusion I can come to is that the government of Ontario had other priorities, and those priorities were more important to them than acting on the information that was presented to them by Public Health officials.