This may be the calm before the coronavirus storm in Ontario, our last chance to plan for the panic of an approaching pandemic.

In the one area where Ontarians could make the biggest difference — keeping sick people away from uninfected healthy people — the Progressive Conservative government has gone backwards in time. Instead of learning the lessons of medical history, Doug Ford’s Tories are trying to rewrite political reality.

A year ago, the premier ignored the near-unanimous advice of medical practitioners and health experts by rolling back the two paid sick days enacted by the previous Liberal government. Ford also reimposed the right of employers to demand sick notes before workers can take emergency leave.

The inequity takes the breath away. Well-off white-collar workers can often find a way to work from home or persuade an ungenerous boss to be more enlightened, but it’s harder for the working poor to push back in a blue-collar workplace that’s not unionized.

Poor people can’t afford to lose a day’s wages when ill. Out of money and options, they will likely go back to the workplace and infect their colleagues and customers; or they will visit their doctor for a sick note, exposing both practitioners and other patients to illness.

Spare a thought for them, but forget not the people they serve. The working poor are the orderlies who empty bedpans, the food handlers who wait on tables, the drivers who deliver packages — for all of us.

Where once this policy might have hit them hardest, it now seems more likely to hurt everyone equally, rich or poor. How much longer until this government undoes this self-inflicted damage and restores the rules that protected everyone?

A month ago, an open letter from more than 175 doctors, nurses and public health workers urged the PC government to restore the paid sick day policies it cancelled, citing the overwhelming body of evidence: “The medical literature consistently states that employees with no sick leave are more likely to go to work and expose others to infection.”

What was indefensible a year ago, and unfathomable a month ago, goes unanswered today.

This is not the time to panic — as of Monday Ontario had 18 cases of the novel coronavirus, compared to 1,800 cases across Italy. But this is surely the time to pressure our government to restore the sick pay policies it wiped out last year, for the protection of every one of us — sick and not yet sick.

At the crossroads of global migration, Toronto’s demographic makeup renders it a vector for the world’s viral hot spots — China, Korea, Iran, Italy — just as we were once an incubator of SARS straight from Hong Kong. But so too are many other global cities.

The difference is that while our health-care system is now mobilized, our political system remains paralyzed. If Ford stands by his closed-minded policy of a year ago — revoking two paid sick days from workers and restoring the power of employers to once again demand sick notes — we may have incubated our very own vector for the virus.

The premier keeps proclaiming the province “open for business.” But he risks a wider shutdown of Ontario businesses if he conflates his outdated political ideology with the pathology of the novel coronavirus.

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Averting a pandemic is about going back to basics: Washing hands and staying home when sick, not making everyone sicker. It is about removing our political blinkers, not buying up every mask in the province (leave them for health professionals and infected patients who need them).

When the history of the novel coronavirus is written, we may look back upon it as a scare story that was overblown. Or we may wonder why our elected government coerced the poorest and sickest among us to infect the workplaces and waiting rooms of all of us.

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