Bruce Arthur: Doug Ford gives up on Halloween, and even epidemiologists say this message will haunt us

Time to egg Queen’s Park. Ontarians could TP it, but we can’t risk toilet paper shortages again. If we can learn lessons from this pandemic, we should.

But now that Ontario in the province’s four COVID-19 hot zones — Toronto, Ottawa, Peel and York — we should consider why that decision is being taken, and what we haven’t learned.

“I understand the intention, and I don’t think there are more people more concerned about the epidemiological situation than I am,” says Dr. Andrew Morris, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Toronto, and the medical director of the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program at Sinai-University Health Network. “But there is no reason why this cannot be done in a safe manner.”

Living life safely and as normally as possible is, even , the goal of public health. For months we have been told to get outdoors, maintain social distance, stick to our immediate family units in serious situations such as this one, and wear masks.

Which sounds a hell of a lot like Halloween.

“It’s like the worst PR moves you can possibly construe for a public health movement that is suffering badly to maintain public confidence,” says Dr. Abdu Sharkawy, an infectious disease specialist and ICU doctor at Toronto Western Hospital. “I’m sure what they’re thinking is we’ll be the stewards of caution, we’ll be extra-safe … I look at it from the point of view that you’ve given people a lot of poor messaging, you didn’t exercise restraint when you needed to, and now you’re taking away something that multiple experts deem safe.”

It’s not the end of the world, but it’s a mess. Ontario didn’t close strip clubs until Sept. 25, opened the casinos on Sept. 28, left spin classes open until after the Hamilton super-spreader event, and has agonized over and waited too long to close businesses even when it’s clear they can be venues of transmission. Heck, it just reopened indoor dance studios.

Oh, and our kids are still jammed in schools. Dr. Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s medical officer of health, said schools did not appear to be significantly contributing to community spread. So why would Halloween? We should be able to make this safe.

“If you think about risk and risk reduction, we have — what, two million kids in schools?” says Morris. “Where we have them sitting in a classroom all day, masked, static, indoors. And we’re suggesting that having likely a smaller collection, outdoors, and again, we should be doing this masked. And encouraging them to do small groups, outdoors; to me, this is not a good balance of the risks and benefits. And once again I think we are unfairly targeting kids here.”

Nobody, anti-maskers and the White House perhaps aside, wants more people to get the virus. So what are we worried about, exactly? People opening their doors to 100 people, said Premier , or rummaging in a bowl or bag of candy, or lining up to get into apartment buildings. Dr. David Williams, the chief medical officer of health, said he worried about people congregating on sidewalks and exchanging candy.

De Villa spoke about people coming together. Dr. Lawrence Loh, Peel’s medical officer of health, said “(I) agree that if perfectly done, the risk can be minimized. The reality, much like mask wearing, is that it’s not likely this will be perfectly done.”

The entire provincial strategy has been about assuming people will follow rules, and now they seem to assume nobody will. Getting the virus from surface transmission is less and less likely: the first real-world evidence of this involved someone wiping their nose and touching an elevator button, and another man picking his teeth and doing the same. There’s a reason we reopened the playgrounds, right?

And Halloween seems purpose-built to be safe, with just a little effort. Give out candy outside, without getting too close. Use tongs, a tube, a slingshot, whatever. Pre-wrap gift bags. Keep to your family only. Keep your distance. We’ve been doing it for seven damned months.

“It’s not like kids are going to congregate in a huddle on the sidewalk like it’s a football game, with masks off, exchanging candy,” says Sharkawy. “That’s not how trick-or-treating happens. Every parent who takes their kids out knows: they’re going to scuttle from house to house. The risk is that they come inside.”

“Everyone knows how to line up and physically distance in our society, right?” says Morris. “There’s no reason we can’t do this here. I’m extremely disappointed by this.”

Look, the province was two to four weeks late in imposing restrictions. Testing was allowed to crash into a reset that may still be muddying the data. It’s unclear if the chief medical officer of health understands some fundamental things about the virus, much less Halloween. We are doing better than we have a right to, in Ontario.

But cancelling Halloween is indicative of the lack of a coherent plan, or coherent communication, or perhaps even fundamental understanding of what we are facing. It we can learn lessons from this pandemic, we should. Get outta here with telling kids to dress up and go on Zoom or whatever.

“The problem with the vernacular that they’re using is it almost invites people to say FU,” says Sharkawy. “I mean, I heard this, and I was frustrated, and I am the most conservative person (on safety) you will meet. I cancelled my kid’s 10-year-old birthday party. All my close friends hate me because I’ve been in Stage 2 for the last four months. And I am saying this is overkill, and you’re going to lose public favour, and create more acrimony, and take more away when there’s no science behind it, no basis. This is an optics decision, 100 per cent.

“We have got to win the battles that we need to, to not extinguish their resolve, their hope.”

This pandemic has been a long, hard time, and now winter is coming. It has taken so much away. Halloween was one we could keep, and even win. The province can still change this. We can still make this safe. We should, at the very least, try.

Bruce Arthur is a Toronto-based columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: