It’s a strange feeling, hope. In the past month, the coronavirus pandemic has stopped cities, slowed time, cleaved us into boxes. Wedding and birthday parties have been cancelled; funerals, that most human ritual, have been all but disbanded. If you see this for what it is, you see a long fight. So hope, in its glimmers, is strange indeed.

But there is hope. In Ontario, the surge has not arrived yet, which disappoints nobody. Ontario’s intensive care units aren’t full, and new hospital admissions are stabilizing. Some hospitals have even reduced shifts for health-care workers, because the old peak was expected to be April 9 and hasn’t happened. They say it’s almost eerie. That is what flattening the curve of new coronavirus infections is supposed to look like. That is the point.

“We’ve seen that the curve might be flattening in Ontario, and that really means keep doing what we’re doing,” says Dr. Nitin Mohan, a physician epidemiologist who was part of the Public Health Agency of Canada’s surveillance co-ordination unit on infectious diseases until late last year, as well as an adjunct professor at Western University teaching public and global health. “There are certain diseases we treat, and certain diseases we manage. For instance, with diabetes we can’t really treat the disease, but we can manage it so it doesn’t get too bad, and we provide the best quality of life.

“What’s happening with this pandemic is, there’s a small window at the start when we’re in the containment phase. A few cases, we contact trace them, where did you go, all that. Then as soon as there’s community spread, we’re in the mitigation phase. So this is where we start closing schools and businesses, and we say: We don’t know where it’s coming from, but it’s in the community. We shut things down.

“And we’re at the point right now where if we continue to mitigate, we can get back to the containment phase. That’s where we want to be. That’s the best-case scenario.”

It’s a big if. One million snowbirds returned to Canada between March 13 and 20, primarily in Ontario and Quebec; the federal messaging on self-isolation versus quarantine versus whether you could go to the grocery store was still muddy. At least two Toronto-area hospitals have projected that their own peaks will happen soon: April 18 for Markham-Stouffville, a few days later for Sunnybrook.

And Ontario’s associate chief medical officer of health, Dr. Barbara Yaffe, said Monday that the province’s peak should hit this week. In an email sent by a Seattle intensive care doctor from Washington state’s outbreak in February, this was point one: “The surge starts suddenly. We went from low, low volumes for a week and then one day the waiting room was full of respiratory patients. Don’t be lulled by the lull.”

So maybe the surge still comes. But we can at least hope that it might not overwhelm us now.

If admissions to both hospital and intensive care flatten out, maybe the biggest moves — Canada closing most of the borders to the United States on March 21, Quebec closing non-essential businesses on March 23, Ontario doing a lesser version on the same day, and everything since — allowed Canada to avoid the worst-case scenario. Maybe. This is the first time we could even entertain the idea.

So this week will tell. And whether an Italy or New York scenario is avoided or not, the first step afterwards will not be to open up businesses. It will be to open up health care, where non-essential services have ground to a halt.

“The health-care system is, for all intents and purposes, shut down to non-COVID-related care that isn’t emergent. And that could be my dad who needs back surgery, someone who needs a lung surgery, someone waiting for a biopsy to find out if they have cancer,” says Dr. Michael Warner, medical director of critical care at Michael Garron Hospital in East York. “We have to figure out a way to turn back on the health-care system to make sure that those patients are safe without overrunning the health system. Because there is capacity. When do we open the tap a little bit? I think it could be soon, but we have to do that in a safe way.”

It is a problem. One Toronto ER doctor has seen patients come in a week after chest pains started, because of a fear of the coronavirus, or a patient who had symptoms for a week and showed up septic. Other doctors echoed the finding: a lot of non-COVID patients are showing up sicker than they should be.

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“There’s delayed presentation with patients not wanting to come to the hospital,” said the doctor. “And clinics and family practices are closed, too. So we’re seeing less BS, but the (non-COVID) patients are sicker than usual. It’s exactly like practising in the lower-resourced areas in the U.S., where somebody might have had a small pneumonia that they would have seen their family doctor for, but they don’t have insurance, so they come to the ER on day five, when they’re sick as hell.”

That needs to change, but it’s the next seven to 10 days first. Whether the surge comes or not, please ignore the few medieval Canadian voices who are impatient with the inconvenience and difficulty of a public health crisis. Don’t listen to bad-faith charlatans who may claim social and physical distancing were overreactions. If you give a patient medicine and the patient begins to improve, you don’t cut off the medicine and claim it was never necessary at all.

We’re giving the patient medicine right now, and it may be working. It’s not perfect; it’s not easy. It will require a lot of medicines, different ones, before we’re back to what we used to be. But there is a glint of daylight here, and we need to continue doing what we’re doing. Because the patient is us.