OTTAWA—The province with the most COVID-19 deaths and infections is taking what one expert calls an “insanely foolish” risk by staging Canada’s most aggressive plan to lift restrictions imposed during the coronavirus crisis.

On Wednesday, Quebec took another step in rolling back strict measures to contain the virus when it announced it would relax travel restrictions starting next Monday in regions where the spread of the disease is under control.

The move comes one day after the province — which leads Canada with more than 26,500 infections and 1,700 deaths attributed to COVID-19 — announced it would start allowing some shops to reopen as early as May 4, followed by the planned resumption of schools and manufacturing activity in the coming weeks.

Amir Attaran, a professor of law, public health and epidemiology at the University of Ottawa, said it is too early to start reopening the economy because Quebec — and Canada in general — does not have enough capacity to test for infections and trace people possibly exposed to the virus.

Describing the province’s plan as a “gamble,” Attaran was blunt about the risks of lifting restrictions without the ability to test masses of people for the virus. He pointed to Germany, which reported this week it is now testing 900,000 cases per week. Canada has conducted more than 750,000 tests since the beginning of the pandemic.

“That’s where you want to be,” he said of the German figures. “And if you’re not there then it’s insanely foolish and negligent to do what (Quebec Premier François) Legault is talking about.”

Speaking to reporters in Quebec City on Wednesday, the province’s deputy premier stressed the reopening plan hinges on the public’s continued “discipline” in maintaining social distancing measures even as some businesses reopen. Geneviève Guilbault said the province won’t hesitate to push back its reopening plan if the situation worsens.

“We’ll continue to evaluate the situation, like I said, but the key word is really discipline,” she said. “We must maintain prohibitions that are in place right now, in terms of public health.”

Quebec’s plan contrasts with Ontario’s. Premier Ford has pointedly refused to affix a schedule to the eventual lifting of measures that have closed businesses and prohibited gatherings of people for weeks. At Queen’s Park Wednesday, Ford said Ontario would face “disaster” if it lifted restrictions too soon and prompted a new spike of infections. While he noted the spread is slowing, he said the province must be “methodical” in how it reopens the economy.

He also urged people in other provinces to stay out of Ontario — and that he has said as much to Quebec’s premier.

Health officials in Ottawa and across the country have reported that weeks of social distancing and restrictions that closed non-essential workplaces and barred foreign visitors from Canada is slowing the spread of the virus. In recent days, several provinces have rolled out blueprints for lifting some restrictions.

On Wednesday, Manitoba announced that dentist offices and other health services, retail shops, museums, libraries and restaurant patios can reopen on May 4 under social distancing guidelines. Saskatchewan and New Brunswick, which have reported far fewer infections than larger provinces, have also announced plans to lift some restrictions in the coming weeks.

Isaac Bogoch, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Toronto, said the pandemic is playing out very differently across the country. But Quebec has the largest “burden of infection” in the country, which makes their plan to reopen seem like a “pretty ambitious timeline to do it safely,” Bogoch said.

“It’s probably premature to lift these restrictions in Quebec.”

Last week, Legault promoted the idea of “herd immunity,” in which the risk of the pandemic drops as a greater proportion of the population gets infected and develops natural immunity to the coronavirus, thus slowing the spread until new infections are eliminated.

Attaran, the University of Ottawa professor, said there is still no proof people develop lasting immunity to the novel coronavirus, but they “likely” do based on evidence from other diseases.

The decision to pursue mass immunity by exposing people to infections should be a political calculation based on science, Attaran said, because it involves balancing the needs of the economy against the desire to take maximum precautions to protect people from a deadly disease.

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“You’ll get to a threshold of herd immunity sooner than those who have distanced,” he said.

“But wherever that threshold is…you’re going to lose a lot of blood between here and there. You’re going to make an awful lot of people sick and an awful lot of people die.”

Attaran added that, if he was given health advice to other provinces, he would call for travel restrictions to limit any resurgence of the virus in Quebec from spilling into the rest of the country. There are already checkpoints on the border between Ottawa and the city of Gatineau to restrict everything but essential travel.

“Unless we close our borders to Quebec, we are by extension part of their experiment,” he said.

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