Sunday, March 15, 2020, the provincial government’s media briefing room in downtown Halifax was packed with journalists and TV cameras. This was before social distancing and gathering limits. Before masks. It was even before COVID-19 had officially arrived in Nova Scotia—this press conference would be the disease’s coming out. True to the Shakespearean warning, Dr. Robert Strang announced three confirmed COVID cases that Ides of March day, describing the patients in detail. Their genders and approximate ages, their home counties, where they’d been travelling before bringing the disease back to Nova Scotia.
It was too much information even for Halifax, with its international airport and international students, its relatively large and relatively cosmopolitan population. In a neighbourhood in the heart of the city, people figured out who the 50something man recently returned from a conference in California was, and went to gawk at his house. The curtains stayed tightly closed, as if to keep the disease in or the gossiparazzi out.
Strang quickly recalibrated as case numbers mounted, and over the course of the pandemic, information flow has tended to get more restricted. Today, the second anniversary of COVID’s arrival in NS, government information is down to a trickle.
Case numbers now come out once a week. Last Thursday’s report said there were 2,459 new cases diagnosed in the week, about 350 per day on average. By comparison, at the height of the first wave—and the province-wide lockdown—the most cases announced in a single day were 55 on April 23, 2020, although the first-wave average never went above 35 cases in a day.
Over the course of the last two years, the pandemic has killed 209 Nova Scotians according to official numbers. The bulk of those deaths, 111 victims, happened in 2020 and 2021, at an average rate of one Nova Scotian dying from COVID every six days. In 2022 there have already been 98 deaths, meaning people are dying at an average rate of higher than one death every day. That most-recent update from the province reported 16 deaths in the week, which works out to COVID currently killing more than two Nova Scotians every day.
As far as we’ve heard from Strang or premier Tim Houston’s government, Nova Scotia is going ahead with its plan to drop basically all COVID rules on gathering, social distancing and masking this Monday, March 21. After two years of lockdowns and limitations to try to slow the disease’s spread, it’s confusing to meet so much death with such a full retreat from public health measures, without a clear reason why. “It certainly isn’t the thing that makes the most sense to me,” Nova Scotia’s respected COVID testing leader Dr. Lisa Barrett said last night on CBC. “I don’t see a good scientific reason for taking away masks in public places at this point.”
Two years in, Nova Scotia has managed to go from too much information to nowhere near enough.
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This article appears in Mar 1-30, 2022.
I would love to see the reasoning behind the decision to open everything up completely – Assuming, of course, there is some reasoning involved. Certainly the basis for doing so cannot be “the science”as the numbers have not changed very much since the middle of last month.
My own theory is that we elected a conservative government and that they are going to make decisions about covid as a conservative government would.
I disagree with doing so but it does not defy reason entirely. Across the country the conservatives have demonstrated a higher tolerance for death in the quest for “getting back to normal”. That position is not necessarily a crazy one We make similar cost/benefit decisions all the time. How many lives could we save by cutting speed limits in half? But who is likely to agree to do that.
As a society I suspect that the last two years has shifted our collective tolerance for death quite a bit. The last few months have certainly demonstrated such a shift with almost half of al deaths from Covid occurring in the first few months of 2022.
One thing I do disagree with is the lip service being paid to giving us all a chance to be responsible and make our own decisions while, at the same time, those in power hold on secret the data that would allow us to do so. I suspect it is at least one part a public health policy aimed at controlling our behaviour and another part controlling access to the numbers for the sake of control itself.
Regardless of the reasoning, the weekly reports seem to provide less information than the daily reports did and the daily reports were not exactly weighed down heavily with data. And it is not as if no one in government is keeping track or that or would take someone more than 15 minutes to put out a press release every day. In absence of some other explanation, I have to believe the decision to keep data for us was a political one. And, as someone who firmly believes in transparency over paternalism, I find that distressing. And, as I had high hopes for this government, it is especially so.