This week, Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health suggested people keep their social contacts to a minimum over the holidays. But the province is currently allowing professional sports and concerts to proceed with full-capacity crowds.Mark Blinch/Getty Images
Doctors say provinces should restrict capacity at sporting events and other mass gatherings as a way of blunting the rapid spread of Omicron rather than focusing on telling people not to meet indoors with family and friends over the holidays.
As Canadians plan their holidays amid surging Omicron cases – Ontario’s COVID-19 Science Advisory Table projects the variant will become the dominant strain in the province this week – there are growing tensions over policy decisions that target individuals rather than venues such as stadiums and concert halls.
This week, for instance, Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health suggested people keep their social contacts to a minimum over the holidays. But the province is currently allowing professional sports and concerts to proceed with full-capacity crowds.
“It’s probably time that these large-scale gatherings are not proceeded with over the next few weeks as we learn what Omicron can do,” said Srinivas Murthy, associate professor at University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Medicine and research chair in pandemic preparedness. “Family gatherings shouldn’t be restricted yet with hockey games being open. I think we need to do things in a logical way.”
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Dr. Murthy said Canada can prevent the need for widespread closings by taking immediate steps to address the threat Omicron poses, such as capacity restrictions, better ventilation in workplaces and schools, an accelerated booster rollout and easy, free access to rapid tests.
“We can avoid a lockdown by doing these things,” he said.
Brooks Fallis, a critical-care physician at the William Osler Health System in the Greater Toronto Area, said the Omicron variant is moving at such unprecedented speed that governments shouldn’t wait before introducing restrictions to try to curb its spread.
“We have to take measures to try to contain it,” Dr. Fallis said. “They should implement capacity limits immediately in any location where people are going to be inside without masks.”
He said that includes restaurants, where people take their masks off to eat, as well as sporting events and other venues where people remove masks indoors for any length of time.
“It’s airborne,” Dr. Fallis said. “[People] breathe it out and it just floats around and other people breathe it in. It spreads so easily, and people don’t even know they’re spreading it.”
The Omicron variant spreads rapidly, with an estimated doubling time in Ontario of about three days. That puts the province on track to record tens of thousands of cases a day in the next few weeks. Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, Theresa Tam, said this week she expects similar trends to take hold in the other provinces in the near future.
The variant is able to infect most people who have received only two doses of a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine, which means those individuals can contract and transmit the virus. While research shows two doses are highly protective against severe illness, there will still be some who become sick enough to be hospitalized, Dr. Fallis said. People who haven’t been vaccinated likely face the highest risk of hospitalization, as they have little protection from the virus.
Booster shots of an mRNA vaccine appear to be highly protective against Omicron, prompting experts to call for an urgent rollout of third doses to everyone 18 and over.
But boosters without capacity limits, better ventilation, access to rapid tests and a series of other protective measures won’t be enough, Dr. Fallis said.
“If we were vaccinating half a million people a day, this virus would still outrace us,” he said. “We need mitigation while we vaccinate.”
He said governments must be leaders when it comes to mitigation, undertaking measures such as making high-quality N95 respirators and rapid tests available to the public so people can protect themselves at work or before a social gathering in a private or public setting.
“[Governments are] asking people to take on the responsibility of protecting themselves and protecting each other, but they’re not providing the tools to do that,” Dr. Fallis said.
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