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And we’re wondering why it’s proving so hard to get people to take social distancing seriously and stay home?

What’s standing in the way of Ontario ramping up its testing to acceptable levels when other jurisdictions have been able to do so? No, I’m not trolling. I’m asking that as a genuine question. Is it a lack of a proper sense of urgency, as Williams’ and Yaffe’s frustrating tendency to speak in cloudy abstractions might lead one to believe? Is it a lack of provincial lab capacity? If so, why, nearly a week after the health minister declared the state of testing “unacceptable,” has Ontario still not enlisted the help of private labs or academic research labs to pitch in?

It’s easy to get tired of saying the same thing over and over, especially when it seems obvious. We need more testing in Ontario. Clearly. No kidding. Everybody knows. But unless someone keeps saying it, preferably loudly, it isn’t going to happen. We’ve seen that over the past six days. And if it doesn’t happen, we won’t know how far or how fast COVID-19 is spreading. And if we don’t know how far or how fast COVID-19 is spreading, we can’t effectively contain it.

Ironically, it’s very possible that greatly increased testing in Ontario could prove reassuring. As of Monday evening, Canada and South Korea had almost identical COVID-19 case fatality rates (the percentage of people diagnosed with the disease who die) — rates that are quite low compared with other countries. But South Korea had tested a significantly greater proportion of its population. Our true “denominator” (the number of people who have COVID-19) is likely to be much larger than we currently know because we’ve been rationing testing, while presumably our “numerator” (the number of people who have died of COVID-19) is pretty accurate (fortunately things aren’t so bad that deaths are easy to miss). So, ramping up testing could expose Canada as having an even lower rate of death from the disease. Yay?