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But Trudeau’s policy nightmare is that at some point he has to make the call on when to attempt to return to some kind of normalcy to ensure Canada doesn’t spiral into economic paralysis.

The threat of mass unemployment is very real, as an exchange with Charles Fallon, president of Montreal-based supply chain management consulting firm LIDD, made clear.

Fallon said he supports the current two-week shutdown and that his staff of 55 engineering consultants are working from home.

But he said a six-week shutdown could see half of his staff being laid off – in a best case scenario. “This holds true not just for me but for every business in the tertiary sector of the economy,” he said.

The government has offered to pay 10 per cent of income costs for eligible small businesses, a measure Fallon said is “laughably inadequate” for a shutdown any longer than two to three weeks.

“As more evidence of the true risks of this virus becomes clear to the population, the more we will question whether we have the right balance between short-term health and long-term health,” he said.

The projections are chilling

That is a debate our society is going to need to have. The case for social distancing is that it slows down how quickly the virus spreads, giving healthcare systems the time to respond.

The reason that Trudeau is being vague on timing is that the most recent modelling suggests it may take more than six months of restrictions to cut the epidemic peak in half. A University of Toronto study suggested that four weeks of intensive social distancing won’t be enough to stop the sharp rise in cases that would overwhelm intensive care units. The study suggested that, with no intervention, there would be 20 times the number of patients requiring intensive care than there are beds.

The projections are chilling. If half the population is infected – a realistic prospect – and two per cent succumb, that means 375,000 Canadians could die of this disease.

There are around 280,000 deaths in this country in any given year, and there would be significant overlap. But that’s still an unacceptable number of lives cut short.