By all appearances, the government sees mandatory quarantine mostly as a disincentive to travel and a way to reassure nervous Canadians. Adding mandatory testing to the regime could only help achieve the latter goal; and the fact quarantine is so easily broken can only hinder it. If mandatory testing had been in effect, it almost certainly would have caught the carriers of the new and more contagious strain of COVID-19 that’s running riot in England. On Sunday, Ontario confirmed that a couple diagnosed with that new strain had contracted it from a traveller from the United Kingdom. It is reasonable to assume a positive test would have prevented that contact from occurring, even absent more stringent quarantine measures.
But an amazing number of otherwise reasonable Canadians will tell you that this sort of thing needn’t, shouldn’t or even can’t happen here. Most commonly, they will say, there just aren’t enough travellers to worry about. “Travel-related COVID-19 cases represent a small number of infections,” CBC News noted in dutifully rubbishing Ford’s complaints. And that is sort of true: Since Dec. 1, 321 cases in Ontario have been reported acquired via travel, which is 0.6 per cent of the total.
But 321 is six times the number of cases linked to “personal service settings” such as nail and hair salons in Ontario since Dec. 1. Such businesses are now legally prohibited from opening. And 321 is just the number of cases determined to have been acquired while travelling; it doesn’t count the number of people they infect after arriving, such as the aforementioned Ontario couple.
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