Canada got plenty of warning about the coronavirus. We even got a dress rehearsal in the form of SARS. So why was our COVID-19 outbreak this bad?

In this episode of Everything Should Be Better , Tristin Hopper explains why Canada’s COVID-19 pandemic didn’t need to be this bad: we got plenty of warning and a dress rehearsal in the form of SARS. Watch the video above, or read the transcript below.

As you may have heard, Canada can proudly lay claim to one of the largest sections of Planet Earth that is completely clear of COVID-19 : Nunavut. The territory has had zero cases of the novel coronavirus, and with high rates of respiratory disease and not the best medical care, they’re aiming to keep it that way.

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So how did Nunavut stay COVID free? Isolation. Nunavut is an entirely fly-in territory; there is no road access to the South. So when the whole coronavirus thing breaks out, it’s a pretty easy fix for Nunavut.

This is an important thing to remember, because it wasn’t too long ago that all the people we pay to stop us from dying of infectious disease pandemics were publicly saying that travel bans do not work and were advising against them.

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For instance, here’s health minister Patty Hajdu in mid-March: “border measures actually are highly ineffective and in some cases can create harm.”

Which is weird, because obviously travel bans do something. Don’t take my word for it: Ask the year 1340. Western Europe is getting hammered by the Black Death, but for the people of Iceland it’s business as usual thanks to a travel ban that restricted ships from plague-stricken areas.

Or, just look at what Canadian Indigenous people have been doing these last few weeks. Nobody in history has been more screwed over by infectious disease than the Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. So what do they do when a pandemic hits? They lock down, close the roads and if you’re not a member of the nation, you’re not getting in for a while.

The WHO justifies its continued opposition to travel bans by essentially saying that it’s not a perfect fix for a pandemic so … don’t bother. Here’s a statement where they mention that some places who closed their border with China recorded some cases of COVID-19 anyway. Case closed.

But … come on now. A border closure isn’t perfect, so the only alternative is to let loaded jet after loaded jet touch down in Canada from affected areas without requiring so much as a temperature check for passengers? We’re supposed to pretend that didn’t have some effect on the severity of our COVID-19 experience?

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Here’s an anti-travel ban story from the CBC that didn’t age well in which you have a fair number of credentialed public health researchers saying that border closures don’t work because if someone wants to travel to Canada, they’re just going to find another way.

You might recognize that as the excuse for all kinds of terrible public policy. We can’t restrict guns, because people will just find other ways to kill each other. You’re not going to stop all speeding, so why are police wasting their time pulling people over? And why are we even bothering to ID people at liquor stores? If my toddler wants to buy a bottle of gin, shouldn’t I want her to buy it in a safe facility rather than driving her to the black market?

Now let’s look at some places that aren’t squeamish about travel restrictions. Taiwan: In early February, they mandated that if you had been to the People’s Republic of China in the last 14 days, you weren’t getting in. Singapore had a similar restriction by Jan. 31. South Korea.

All of these countries are right next door to Ground Zero for COVID-19. They had days of warning, we had months of warning, and they’re outperforming us.

It’s too late now, but the reason I bring this up is because it’s just one of several major public health screw-ups that made this pandemic way worse than it needed to be.

Here’s an example: Let’s say that Health Canada is Transport Canada. Now say a whole bunch of planes start falling out of the sky in China. A month later, planes start falling out of the sky in Iran. The Iranian transport minister assures us everything’s fine, but then the next day he’s in a plane crash.

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The month after that, all of Italy’s planes are falling out of the sky. If, throughout all of this, Transport Canada had been feverishly assuring Canadians that the risk of plane crashes was “low,” don’t you think we’d have some tough questions when our own planes started inevitably falling out of the sky?

Or, here’s another analogy. I’m in coastal B.C., which means that one of these days I’m probably going to be in a major earthquake.

Say, by some miracle, we get two months’ warning that the earthquake is going to hit. You’d obviously drop everything and focus on the pending disaster, right? You’d stock up on critical supplies, you’d ensure vulnerable populations were in a safe place (particularly the elderly) and you would be spending those two months constantly drilling the population on how to live and work through the crisis.

An earthquake is a bit different than a pandemic, but it’s safe to say that basically none of those things happened until COVID-19 had already established a major beachhead all across Canada.

In some cases, health authorities even actively discouraged common-sense mitigation measures such as masking and social distancing

We may be through the worst of this crisis, and we may have been spared the raw carnage of Italy or New York City. But Canada was blessed with plenty of warning of what this virus was and what it could do. We even got a dress rehearsal in the form of SARS.

It’s very reasonable to ask whether it needed to be this bad.