How To Lift A Lockdown

A prescription for reopening the country after the COVID-19 pandemic

- Danielle Groen

After Canada began to emerge, in 2003, from the spring outbreak of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus — sars-CoV, first of its name — Ross Upshur thought it might be worthwhile to study public perceptions about quarantines. At the time, he was a family physician at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital who, thanks to his background in public health, had found himself in charge of enforcing the quarantine of hundreds of people; all told, more than 25,000 people in the Toronto area were kept isolated for ten-day stretches in their homes. Upshur understood that the practice raised plenty of ethical issues: Was it a proportionate response to the risk? Did restricting individual freedoms prevent a greater harm to society? Could the government ensure that the needs of those in isolation would still be met? But he was also curious: Just how bad did Canadians think it was to violate a quarantine order? Was it like running a stop sign? Was it like roughing someone up? Was it like . . . killing them?

The Canadians surveyed back then gave the question some thought, and a full half of them concluded that, yes, breaking quarantine was the equivalent of manslaughter. An additional 27 percent compared it to felony assault. “We were shocked when we got the results,” Upshur says. “We went, ‘Holy crow, Canada is really bullish on quarantine!’”