OTTAWA—The possibilities are bleak. But you don’t get to see them yet.

That was the bottom line Wednesday as officials from three levels of government — Toronto, Ontario and Canada — alluded to sobering projections for how bad the COVID-19 crisis might get even as they refused to show them to the public.

Premier Doug Ford warned a “surge is coming” but stopped short of detailing the province’s expectations for the spread of the virus because overestimating the impacts could “create panic.”

Those expectations prompted Toronto’s top medical officer to lay down strict new measures to slow the disease even as the city similarly refused to release the projections that left Dr. Eileen de Villa “deeply concerned.”

And in Ottawa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his office declined to release specifics of the “range of scenarios” for COVID-19 that includes worst-case projections that Trudeau has already described as “fairly dire.”

Instead of publishing details of this dark forecast for the virus, as happened this week in the U.S. when the White House said the virus would kill 100,000 to 240,000 people, Trudeau called on Canadians to rise to the greatest challenge Canada has faced since the World War II.

“The government alone cannot win this fight. We all have to answer the call of duty. This is service that most of us have never been called upon to do. We, each of us, have to live up to our end of the bargain,” Trudeau said during his daily address to the media at Rideau Cottage on Wednesday.

“Listening to public health rules is your duty. Staying home is your way to serve. So be smart about what you do, about the choices you make. That is how you will serve your country and how we will all serve each other. How well we do this right now determines where our country will be in two weeks or in two months. It’s in our hands. It’s in your hands,” he said.

At Queen’s Park, after Ford was pressed to outline a surge scenario, the province’s chief medical officer committed to providing a projection next week.

But Ford and Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott would not go into details at their Wednesday news conference. Elliott said officials are waiting to see how the daily case count goes once the province’s testing backlog is eliminated, likely by early next week.

“There’s different models… If we pick one model over another it sends two different messages,” Ford told reporters.

“Those models can drastically, drastically change. If we underestimate on one side and we overestimate on the other, and create a panic if we overestimate. But the facts are very clear. We’re going through turbulent waters. We’ve been saying it over and over again make sure that you don’t congregate.”

Leading health officials later stepped in to fill in the blanks, with Canada’s chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, declaring “none of the scenarios” is good and that the pandemic will test the capacity of the country’s health-care systems no matter what. And while Tam said it is “not that helpful” to use simple projections for the future spread of the disease, she explained that “the truth of the matter” is that Canada’s health systems are vulnerable to a surge in infections.

That’s why it is important for governments to expand capacity for treatment as the public at large stays at home and avoids contact with others to curb the spread of the virus, she said.

Failure to slow infections could be “disastrous,” added Dr. Howard Njoo, the deputy public health officer. He said some of the worst projections show 30 to 70 per cent of Canadians could be infected — a figure cited previously by federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu — and that Canadians need to “flatten the curve” of infection so that hospitals aren’t flooded with sick patients that need critical care like ventilators.

“The really difficult message to Canadians is that, under a whole range of the scenarios, this health system isn’t well-designed to cope with it if we don’t do something about it now,” Tam said.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“Even if you look at some of the lower attack rates (how fast the virus spreads), it is not something that we want to see.”

On a later teleconference, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. David Williams, explained that slight changes in the rate of infection in the early phase of a pandemic can create huge differences in projected fatalities and infections.

“We want to be a bit more exact than that,” he said. “That means as we get more data coming in and we get further up the curve a bit, we can get more accurate projections.

“What the premier’s concerned about is…you can confuse people if you jump around between numbers.”

“We would rather not confuse the public but we do want to plan…stay tuned.”

There are already signs that health-care systems across the country are under duress. Quebec Premier François Legault warned this week that the province could run out of some medical supplies in a matter of days. In Ontario, Premier Ford established a $50 million fund to help companies shift production to medical supplies. He warned there is now “very little separating us” from severe impacts seen in Italy and Spain, two of the worst-hit countries where the virus has killed a total of more than 22,000 people, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

“Thousands of lives are at stake,” Ford said.

In a statement Wednesday, the Ontario Hospital Association said it is “extremely concerned many Ontario hospitals are running low on personal protective equipment, particularly masks” worn by medical staff.

Hajdu said Wednesday that the federal stockpile of medical supplies is “likely” not big enough for Canada’s needs during the pandemic, blaming “decades” of government underfunding to prepare for a crisis like that which the world is facing now.

Hajdu said this is why Canadian companies need to shift to mass production of required supplies. The federal government said this week it is devoting $2 billion to bulk-buying supplies on the global market, including surgical masks, COVID-19 testing kits and ventilators. This money is also going to orders from companies in Canada that are ramping up production of these supplies for the health-care system.

The federal government has already ordered 157 million new surgical masks, 60 million heavier N95 masks, and is looking to acquire another 4,000 ventilators on top of the estimated 5,000 in hospitals across Canada.

Even so, Tam predicted “some very difficult decisions” may be necessary about who gets resources and when as the virus continues to spread in Canada.

“At the end of the day, our neighbour’s life depends on us taking this seriously, because ultimately at the end of the day, our health system cannot cope with a surge,” Hajdu said.

“Canadians play a very important role in keeping their neighbour, their loved one, their relative alive.”

With files from Jennifer Pagliaro and David Rider

Read more about: