Not only did our public health officials fail to learn the headline lesson from the SARS Report, many of them sounded borderline deranged
On Thursday, Ottawa’s public transit agency announced that passengers and staff would have to wear a mask or face covering in order to come aboard. The rule comes into effect on June 15 — two weeks and four days after the announcement; three months after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic; more than two months after New York State made masks mandatory on public transit; six weeks after Spain and Germany followed suit; and more than a month after France joined in.
Thankfully, albeit at a glacial pace, they have changed their minds. Even the federal government, although with obvious reluctance, now advises wearing a mask where social distancing isn’t possible. But their previous advice will need to be answered for. It never withstood a moment’s scrutiny. “The second two arguments may have been internally valid in the trials that produced them, but we have no evidence that they are externally valid in the context of COVID-19,” Greenhalgh trenchantly argued. “’The public’ here are not volunteers in someone else’s experiment in a flu outbreak — they are people the world over who are trying to stay alive in a deadly pandemic. They may be highly motivated to learn techniques for most effective mask use.
“If the commission has one single take-home message,” Campbell’s report avers, “it is the precautionary principle that safety comes first, that reasonable efforts to reduce risk need not await scientific proof.”
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