Time to clamp down on international airports
We are belatedly bending the curve, yet the U.K. variant and more virulent mutations of the virus could blow the curves sky high again.
What to do?
We could lock down here at home tighter, longer — harder than ever.
Or clamp down on our international airports, tighter, longer — better later than never.
What we cannot afford to do is keep pretending — and persuading people — that a larger lockdown matters more than anything, to the exclusion of everything. Especially airports that are the point of origin for every patient zero in this pandemic.
Yes, we could do more on the home front if we knew it would pay off. But why are we doing as little as possible at our airports — a proven vector for the virus — at such incalculable cost?
Our businesses have been locked down since early December, our people are housebound and our high schools are still locked shut. All that time — all through the past year — our airports have been given a free pass, giving the virus a longer runway.
While our land borders have been firmly closed to non-essential travellers, at great expense, there was always one big glaring loophole: open skies for anyone who wanted to fly anywhere for any non-essential reason with expensive ticket in hand — no questions asked.
It is hard to fathom how the federal government could be so lax and laissezfaire, so negligent and delinquent. It is harder still to understand why even questioning this lapse is somehow considered an act of deflection or distraction by provincial premiers such as Quebec’s François Legault or Ontario’s Doug Ford.
Forget, for a moment, the politics — because it’s not always about personalities but policies. Ignore the blame games and conspiracy theories, the character assassination launched months ago against medical officer of health David Williams (falsely accused in print of being a Ford stooge and appointee, both untrue), never mind the sniping that has surfaced in recent days against other doctors caught in conflicts of interest, real or apparent, relevant or tangential.
Can we focus on the fundamentals by putting people first and personalities last? COVID-19 is confounding in its complexity and lethal in its variations without obsessing over puerile personal fetishes.
Here’s a question that demands an answer: By what possible logic can anyone argue that our airports are not a gateway for the virus — not just the novel coronavirus in its original form, but the variants from Brazil, Britain and South Africa?
To be clear, COVID-19 didn’t appear out of thin air, it landed on an airplane. The virus kept coming back, again and again, planeload after planeload, spreading repeatedly into the community and into our nursing homes.
You can keep trying and failing to protect the most vulnerable from the virus by fantasizing about an “iron ring” — a misconceived misnomer. But why not stop COVID-19 at the source, at the airport?
Too late, they say, it landed long ago, nothing to see here. Yet all these months later a more transmissible and potentially lethal variant is in the air, so why are we letting it land day by day?
Under pressure from the premiers — first Legault, followed by Ford — the federal government finally ordered travellers to provide negative test results prior to boarding their inbound flight, starting in early January. One year and possibly thousands of carriers too late. Any day now, judging by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s latest musings, Ottawa will require arriving passengers to quarantine at their own expense in hotels or other facilities — rather than slipping home out of sight and out of oversight. The reaction has been puzzling.
Critics suggest that airport arrivals are no big deal, because they represent a small fraction of overall cases. This from the same epidemiologists who worry, rightly, about single-figure percentages that can produce exponential growth. Or they tell us that airport seepage is a side show, because the real problem is Ford’s failure to stop the community leakage into nursing homes. Their illogical analogy is that it’s too late to bother with airport restrictions, because the horses have bolted past the barn doors.
But what if we could still count on a COVID-19 fence surrounding the farm, offering a second line of defence, another chance to regain control and secure the perimeter so we can get them behind closed doors again? Why close our eyes to the possibilities?
Consider what Israel did, cancelling all international flights for a week. We are different societies with different geographies, but we can at least learn the key lesson — that every airport runway is ground zero for COVID-19.
Still, critics cherry pick the bits that fit. They speak approvingly of Israel’s world-leading vaccination rate — by outbidding other buyers and harnessing its experience in a war zone, where gas masks are distributed in a flash — yet they overlook an Israeli infection rate far worse than ours.
The temptation is to compare Ontario unfavourably and unfairly to jurisdictions that don’t remotely resemble us, such as Newfoundland, New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan or South Korea — ignoring the reality that some of them are small jurisdictions (we are large) and that they are geographically isolated from their neighbours. All the overseas success stories imposed strict off-site quarantine for airport arrivals with comprehensive airport controls, so why dismiss that tactic here in Canada?
There is no shortage of shortcomings in Ontario’s performance to date — whether on paid sick days or failing to act faster, sooner, on making masks mandatory (and giving people more advice on the best ones to wear). But there is no way to excuse, or explain away the federal inaction at airports.
Never mind the noise, ignore the static, forget the partisan biases and personal grudges that people keep falling back on — there’s no time in a pandemic. Focus on the problems (of which there are many) but also the remedies (not so many).
Trudeau and Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland will be judged by how they handle just two jobs right now: getting more of the vaccine through our airports, and keeping more of the virus out of our airports.
It’s not about playing politics. It’s about providing protection.