Lifting mask mandates 'a slap in the face' to responsible Canadians, says doctor

Story Transcript

As mask mandates start lifting across the country, an Ottawa physician is sounding the alarm.

Ontario announced it will scrap most mask mandates — including in schools, restaurants, gyms and stores — across the province on March 21, following in the footsteps of several other provinces including Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick.

"We are now learning to live with and manage COVID-19 for the long term," Dr. Kieran Moore, Ontario's chief medical officer of health, said Wednesday. "This necessitates a shift to a more balanced response to the pandemic."

However, he noted the mandate could come back into effect should the province see another spike in cases. 

Several doctors have spoken out against lifting the mandates. Among them is Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth, an Ottawa family physician who has been an outspoken critic of Ontario's pandemic response.

Here is part of her conversation with As It Happens guest host Gillian Findlay. 

You have been a great advocate for mask wearing throughout this pandemic, so what do you make of the fact that so many jurisdictions are now moving to remove the mask mandates?

I grew up in Toronto. When we were kids, our parents would say, "Would you jump off the CN Tower if everybody else were doing so?"

You're like, "No."

And yet it seems that our governments are doing that.

I know Ontario is just the latest in the provinces of Canada and also places in the world to get rid of masks. But it is truly irresponsible and it is a slap in the face to everyone who works in health care and everybody who has been so responsible for the last two years.

But the politicians are being informed by their scientific advisers and panels. Are you suggesting that they are getting bad information?

I can't comment on what information they are relying on here, but I know that [Ontario] stopped testing [outside of vulnerable communities].

And yet from a family medicine perspective — and the perspective of my colleagues who are pediatricians — what we're seeing is … patients whose entire families have COVID. And these are people who are, you know, they're babies, they're toddlers, they're preschoolers, they're school children, they're grandparents, they're parents, [and] they're teachers.

When we say that we don't know in Ontario whether we have 2,000 or 20,000 new cases a day, like, that is problematic right from the start.

Because we're not testing.

We're not testing. We're not using all of those tools that we have.

We're now two years into this. Our vaccination rates are high. We have antiviral treatments available to us now. Kids, while not vaccinated, small kids anyway, are at much less risk of getting sick. So if we can't drop the mandates now, when can we?

But kids aren't at much less risk of getting sick.

Kids are getting sick and then the rest of their family members are getting sick. And, you know, what it really boils down to is we have a responsibility to take care of each other.

Wearing a mask is not a hardship. It's not a restriction. It's a protection.

Compassion means that we care about everyone. We care about everyone under the age of five who's too young for a vaccine. We care about everybody who has asthma, who's struggling to breathe when they get COVID. We care about everyone who is immunocompromised, anyone who's vulnerable to infection.

And we're all vulnerable to reinfection. So, you know, it's really not a fair thing to say, you know: "Well, just wear a mask if you're vulnerable." That's not how this works.

We are just throwing caution to the wind.- Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth, Ottawa family doctor

The argument some people make is, sure, there may be still be incidents, but people aren't getting seriously sick in the way that they were at the beginning of this pandemic. And so I guess it still comes down to the question that people are struggling with, [which is]: Where is that bright line? When will we know that it's OK to drop wearing masks?

When case numbers are down, and we can see that. When we first introduced masks, we had maybe 150 cases a day in Ontario. Now we're talking about maybe 20,000 cases a day. It just doesn't make sense.

The virus, as it continues to spread and mutate, doesn't become less virulent. It doesn't become less dangerous. We're going to have other variants that are going to potentially be more dangerous. And how quickly do we forget the body bags?

I really think that that is what it boils down to, because as physicians and other health-care workers, we were worried about ourselves, our families, [and] our communities dying. Now we are at a stage where we have all the tools, and we have all the knowledge, and we are just throwing caution to the wind.

So what are the political leaders — who are, again, being informed by their medical health advisers and their staff — what are they responding then, do you think?

They're responding to a very small, small part of the population that just occupied Ottawa. They're responding to a very, very small minority of people who think that it is such a hardship to wear a mask, when it's not.

We heard Ontario's top doctor say today that even with the dropping of the requirements, people can still choose to wear a mask. So why is that not good enough?

By making it the responsibility of the individual, we know that people have been choosing a lot of selfish activities throughout the pandemic.

It means [the student] who goes to school without the mask is going to still put everybody who came to school with a mask at risk. 

And now ... my patient who has asthma, or my patient who has a newborn baby, or my patient who has a grandmother who's undergoing treatment for cancer — they're all now at risk because that person made a decision.

At the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of attention [and] respect was given to the people who were advocating for strong measures. Do you feel that that's slipping away now? Do you think that, in some ways, the battle has been lost?

We have been demonized for doing things like advocating to make sure that everybody can get access to a vaccine. We've been harassed and threatened by people. And, I mean, this has happened to doctors and it's happened to nurses and it happened to journalists. It's happened kind of to anybody who has tried to stand up for community health and for science.

Are we losing the battle? No. And the reason that we can say no is because, in fact, if you look at the numbers of people who have been responsible, who have gotten their vaccine, who have been wearing masks, the public is actually, by and large, listening to the science and to medicine.

But the politicians are going to run with whatever is going to get them re-elected and they're looking to a very small base of people who aren't going to necessarily do what's responsible.

Written by Sheena Goodyear. Interview produced by Katie Geleff. Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.