Relaxing the COVID Lockdown

"The problem is, you have folks thinking, OK, we did it, we're done. Let's get back to regular life."
"The problem is the virus is still here."
"There will be a second wave, right? I think it's inevitable."
"I think someone's going to get knocked by smugness moving forward."
"Most of the country actually looks like they're headed into the finish line for this wave. But I do think that when it re-surges, someone's going to [end up] like New York City."
Dr.David Fisman, infectious diseases specialist, professor, epidemiology, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto 

"[It's important to recognize that we don't fully understand] why peaks occur in pandemics like this."
"This virus, if it's acting like a flu virus, may very well be in its own schedule and its own time. So the top scenario is one where it happens and then it just continues to burn and burn and burn and burn until basically enough people have been infected [to create herd immunity]." 
"We just keep having situations like we've been having."
Michael Osterholm, director, CIDRAP [Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy]

"You might actually see an odd situation where people start to really underestimate the risk to older people living in the community."
"And older people themselves might start underestimating the risks for them[selves] because they never really saw the carnage that we expected to occur for community-dwelling older adults."
"You've got folks who are saying, I just really want to see the grandkids, right? And I say, well, if they're above the age of six and they can control themselves, sure."
"But younger children, younger grandkids who are two or three, they don't understand these notions of physical distancing."
Dr.Samir Sinha, director, geriatrics, Sinai Health System, Toronto

A young child stands outside the entrance to a closed playground in Montreal on Sunday. (Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press)

Canadian cases

CONFIRMED

66,425

(Today: +1,514)

DEATHS

4,569

(Today: +161)

RECOVERED

30,239

(Today: +979)

1,080,883 tests administered  (Today: +31,712)

The first wave of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that has caused this current global pandemic with COVID-19 striking populations all over the world, and exacting a death toll among the vulnerable that has now exceeded a quarter-of a million deaths globally, appears to have abated in most places where it rushed in with monumental impact. Now that most provinces in Canada, like countries all over the world, are feeling they've weathered the storm and must respond to the public's clear wish to be released from protective lockdown, talk of gradually re-opening is rife.

Wherever new cases have begun diminishing in number and confidence is growing as a result, given that the health-care system has been coping well, cautious plans to re-open society and businesses are proceeding, with the coming weeks scheduled to see gradually increased loosening of restrictions that were imposed to protect against the viral disease. Canadians fantasize the return of the world they are familiar with in short order, a world whose comforts they have been brutally deprived of.

Leading experts who study past pandemics and are attempting to prise details of this one from the jaws of this virulent and deadly new zoonotic, to consider that what has occurred with the novel coronavirus represents only a first wave, and that COVID-19 is not necessarily waning either in Canada nor around the world. Their expectation is that the disease will be acknowledged as a dark shadow in our lives whose presence we will have to adapt to at least for the foreseeable future.

Workers disinfect a stretcher outside the Madonna Care Community in Orléans, Ont., on Sunday. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)

There is no one within the scientific medical community who has as yet any confidence in knowing the trajectory of this virus. When the next wave will arrive, or how it will further impact society when it does. Epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists globally are all strenuously making an effort to reveal the mysteries of the novel coronavirus. A group of scientists at the U.S.Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy last week released a study predicting three possible scenarios.

The first scenario has it that the first wave is to be followed by a repeating series of smaller yet significant waves through the summer and into the fall, then diminishing in 2021; the waves unpredictable in timing and location yet each time they appear extreme physical distancing is likely to be mandated once again. In other words, more of the same, a lot more, repeatedly for another year leading to more deaths, isolation and impact on economies.

A sign of support for front-line workers is seen in Toronto on Sunday. (Alan Habbick/CBC)

A second scenario projects that the current wave is merely an introduction, and after tapering off over summer, COVID would return in the fall harsher than ever, causing a more significant wave to tear through populations before waning in a series of smaller waves taking up the following year. Then the third scenario where rather than another wave, small bumps occur repeatedly lasting into 2022, with no set pattern.

"This is going to be a marathon. This marathon is going to last another nine, 12, 18 months", warned Dr.Gabriel Leung, epidemiologist and medical school dean at Hong Kong University. According to a Ryerson University count, 82 percent of victims in the first wave represented people with vulnerabilities; seniors, residents of long-term care. Clustering in such a manner provided the perfect opportunity for a highly infectious virus to thrive.

Canada's extremely large demographic of healthy older adults have been locked up at home, unable to see their children and grandchildren. With the relaxation of physical distancing regulations they will be anxious to be on the outside, to visit with their families, and live normal lives. In so doing, in a precipitate manner, before the advent of a cure or a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, they will be placing their lives at risk.

It is also becoming alarmingly clear that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is exceedingly complex, such that experts are becoming increasingly aware that with its complexity comes the recognition of increased symptoms, some of which are morbidly deadly. The vaccine is also mutating, as viruses are wont to do, and another concern is that as it mutates the most successful of its new presentations may be those that will become even deadlier than the original.