1) Montreal, for months the epicenter of the #pandemic in Canada, was declared a green zone Monday according to a new alert system by the Quebec government. In this thread, I will raise questions about this classification amid the city’s apparent #COVID19 resurgence.

2) The alert system, as you can see from the chart below, has four colors: green, yellow, orange and red. The government seems to have stopped relying mostly on a rolling seven-day average of 20 cases per million population as a criterion to consider public health restrictions.

3) Instead, officials are now using three other criteria: the epidemiological situation in a given region, the control of transmission of the #coronavirus and the capacity of the health system to deal with a potential surge in #COVID19 cases. But what of the seven-day average?

4) Health Minister Christian Dubé did not mention at his news conference Tuesday that Montreal’s seven-day average rose to 22.93 cases per million residents, up from 21.46 on Monday. Instead, he focused on the fact the overall number of new #COVID cases dropped in Quebec to 163.

5) You’ll recall that when Quebec was observing daily #COVID19 cases in the 60-range three weeks ago, Dubé was at ease talking about the rolling seven-day average. He would later cite a specific number as a threshold to consider restrictions: 20 cases per million population.

6) Yet now that Montreal, Laval, Quebec City, and the Eastern Townships have crossed the seven-day threshold, the 20-cases-per-million criterion appears to have been swapped for more subjective criteria like the "capacity of the health system" to deal with a second #COVID19 wave.

7) And what is Montreal’s capacity like? We know that 800 Montreal nurses have quit since the start of the #pandemic. We know there’s a backlog of more than 92,000 surgeries. And we know that tonight a dozen city emergency rooms are overcrowded. See below.

8) Yet despite Montreal rising seven-day average of #COVID19 infections, major problems with hospital infrastructure and cases identified in 39 schools in the city (but no outbreaks), Quebec has deemed to classify Montreal as a green zone. Nearby Laval, meanwhile, is yellow.

9) Harvard’s Global Health Institute devised its own color-coded alert scale over the summer concerning school reopenings. It uses actual case numbers to assign the risk level. A region with less than one case per 100,000 people is rated the lowest risk, green.

10) Montreal’s rolling seven-day average per 100,000 residents is 2.29, almost double what it was three weeks ago. According to the Harvard scale, Montreal would classify as yellow, not green. What kind of message does Quebec want to send to the public?

11) Is the government suggesting the hitherto epicenter of Canada’s #pandemic poses the same lower level of risk as some far-flung regions in the province? How should Montrealers interpret the fact that they suddenly find themselves in a green zone? Will some lower their guard?

12) The health minister emphasized the importance of communication in the #pandemic. Communication means telling it like it is, not sugar-coating matters. It also means using measurable criteria that the public can follow. Is Quebec truly doing this? End of thread and stay safe.