Curfew. The word comes from the Middle Ages. It is said to originally refer to that time when the bell rang to warn people that it was time to put out the fire in the fireplace. At nightfall, before going to bed, we covered the embers with a cast iron cover to avoid any risk of fire. With houses made of wood, a small fire could quickly become a very big one, out of control …
As the COVID-19 fire wreaks havoc, the month-long curfew announced Wednesday night has another function, of course. The fire is already caught. The blaze seems out of control. It is too late to cover it. We can no longer avoid it.
So why a curfew? To sound the alarm. To strike the imagination. To remind you that the hour is serious. That even if the vaccine makes us see the end of the tunnel, the road to get there is still long. And that slackening of prevention measures has a tragic cost.
More than 8,400 Quebecers have already perished in this terrible fire since March. There are thousands of major burns. And the exhausted firefighters, at work since March in our hospitals and CHSLDs, fear the worst.
I think of the dead. But I also think of the living. To those who have lost loved ones since the start of the pandemic, sometimes in cruel conditions. I think of those who could not hold the hand of a loved one on their deathbed.
I think of caregivers – doctors, nurses, attendants and other “guardian angels” with burnt wings – breathless, scarred for life by traumatic scenes. I think of patients suffering from something other than COVID-19 who see their surgery and their hopes put off.
The least thing, in memory of those who perished and in solidarity with the sooty healthcare workers trying to save as many lives as possible, would be to take it seriously. To make its contribution to avoid an even more catastrophic scenario where hospitals, overwhelmed, will have to ration beds and oxygen. Where we will have to choose who we can save… Who will spend the winter and who will never see another spring.
For all these reasons, Prime Minister François Legault is right to say that a “shock treatment” is needed. Symbolically, the imposition of a curfew can have this effect. But knowing that evening walkers in January are not exactly the biggest threat to public health, we would have liked more consistency in the shock treatment.
If the school is really the priority, as the Prime Minister says, it should have been given a priority shock treatment before reopening it. We should have listened to what experts have been saying for months on the subject of contagion by aerosols. Listen to the physicist and scientific coordinator of the COVID-STOP collective Nancy Delagrave, for example, who was stunned on Wednesday to learn that elementary schools would welcome children on January 11, without masks in class from the first to the fourth year, while the epidemiological situation is also worrying.
“It’s irresponsible. According to the criteria of the Harvard Global Health Institute, we have really exceeded the threshold where it is possible to open schools. “
– Nancy Delagrave, physicist and scientific coordinator of the COVID-STOP collective
This threshold is 25 new daily cases of COVID-19 per 100,000 population. Monday, in Quebec, it was almost 34, she said.
The priority shock treatment for reopening schools in a safe manner should, in addition to taking this threshold into account, include adequate preventive measures to prevent transmission by aerosols. We think about wearing a mask in class even for the youngest – no, it is not ideal, but it is certainly less traumatic for a child than knowing that he has transmitted the virus to his parents. We also think of course of ventilation and air purification, as well as weekly saliva tests for everyone. This is what is done in schools in New York to screen for asymptomatic cases and remote school for students with COVID-19 or those whose parents refuse to take the test.
“These are all non-existent measures in Quebec at the moment,” notes the physicist. We really do not have the winning conditions … From the start, we have been doing half-measures and we have half-results. ”
Shock treatment? Rather a semi-shock treatment … which ends up shocking for the wrong reasons.
A curfew to make it clear to the public that the hour is dire and that we all have a role to play in saving as many lives as possible, yes, okay. But to really cover the fire of COVID-19, the government will also have to show that it is really doing everything in its power, with scientific data to support it.
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