I meant to do this yesterday, but I was acclimatizing to my new job as a grade one teacher to a class of one. Forgive my tardiness, but here goes: a Twitter thread to accompany my latest column at http://TVO.org , which asks, essentially, what Ontario will do next. +

(The column, by the way, is attached here.)

Anyway, here's the crux of the issue. What Ontario is doing now isn't working. Anyone who dares talk about this immediately draws out angry partisans of every colour and creed, but this isn't about that. https://www.tvo.org/article/parts-of-ontario-have-lost-control-of-covid-19-so-what-now

Maybe you hate Doug Ford, and think he's terrible. Maybe you love him and think I'm a commie hack. Maybe you're one of those insufferable fools who just reflexively replies to every thread with "Now do [something marginally related, at best]."

I don't care. It doesn't matter. +

All that matters is that we actually do have some objective guidelines here. We can say, with certainty, what's working and what's not. (Not about all of it, but we can bring certainty to SOME things.)

So we can say this with certainty: what Ontario is doing isn't working. +

As I've noted here before, the total lockdown of March-April (and longer) was carpet bombing, because we didn't know enough about the virus to target it specifically. We had to just do saturation bombing runs on everything because we couldn't be more precise. +

NO ONE thought this was good and NO ONE thought it was sustainable. But we turned to the blunt instrument so that we could buy ourselves time to learn, to prepare, and then go after future outbreaks with precision-guided weapons instead of just flattening everything.

This was a good plan! Or, at least, it was the best plan available. The idea of buying time with the huge lockdown, so that future responses could be more nimble and targeted, made perfect sense and I was 100% on board with it.

But we're doing that now. It's not working. +

Whenever a human is confronted with a plan of theirs that doesn't work, we do predictable things. We deny it's not working. We blame someone else for it not working. We insist it's working, if you measure it right. We blame someone else, usually Mike Harris, for it not working. +

We lament that nothing could work. We go binge watch some Deep Space 9.

(That's what you all do, right? Just me?)

But sooner or later, we need to admit that if a plan isn't working, you need a new, better plan. +

Ontario is here now. And contrary to what some of you seem to think, what we're dealing with now isn't just some brief blip caused by holiday merrymaking, that just needs to be digested and move through our system, and we're back to a more sustainable level before long. +

The merrymaking has raised the floor of COVID in Ontario. It created a new normal, and cases will stay at this approx level until we materially bring the R factor down. Ontario's pre-holiday efforts were holding R around 1, at best.

More of that just bakes in TODAY's levels. +

Meanwhile, Ontario set out objective standards for what failure would look like, using ICU capacity as the metric, and as of this week, we have broken through that threshold.

We are failing, and we have no plan to stop failing.

+

What we have to do is hard, but not complicated. We need to bring down the rate of transmission in Ontario. This is a good example of something that's easy to say and hard to do. But the necessity isn't mysterious or controversial. +

To be simplistic, we can do three (broad) things.

1. Keep seeing cases rise, and things will get worse in the hospitals, threatening the system with collapse.

2. Hold cases at roughly today's level ... and things will get worse in the hospitals, threatening collapse.

Crap.

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That leaves us with option 3: Bring cases down.

Like I said, easy to say WHAT to do. The challenge is figuring out how to do it.

I honestly feel for Ford and Co. He takes blame for things beyond his control. A big part of the problem is public fatigue. How do we fix that? +

A lot of you are probably pissed I said that, but it's true. He has definitely screwed stuff up, and definitely deserves some blame, but a big part of this is the old problem of leading horses to water and they — us — won't drink (stay home). +

We aren't good at separating what a politician should and shouldn't be blamed for. And a lot of you are so (justifiably) mad at Ford for some things that you're angry at him for not fixing stuff that is honestly simply beyond his ability right now. +

I have no idea what the government can do at this point to get people back on side with the kind of steps needed to bend the curve back down. We have less time than most of us realize (or want to admit). And I haven't even factored in possible new, more contagious strains. +

But what we have to do is, at least in big picture terms, obvious. Whether there's political will to try, and public willingness to go along with it, are questions I simply can't answer.

But this is only going to get harder the longer we wait. +

Quebec is reportedly going to announce another hard lockdown. Large parts of the U.K. are doing the same. Do I want this for Ontario? I really, really do not.

Do I see another option right now? No.

Gonna be a very, very interesting few weeks, I think.

Thanks.

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