[minkowski]

The interesting part of this letter isn't any novel or lucid argument but what it's arguing against, which in the context of the mentioned earlier Ontario Hospital Assocation statement almost comes across as a straw man. The letter spends most of its time arguing against near-total lockdowns such as Ontario experienced from March through June even though almost nobody is currently proposing this - even the OHA statement only advocates a temporary closure of indoor venues such as restaurants and banquet halls in affected areas (albeit including large cities such as Toronto and Ottawa) - with a parenthetical warning about the harms of "rotating" school closures to childrens' health, even though this wasn't really proposed. In fact, the earlier statement explicitly proposed closing food service venues in order to prevent school closures and elective surgery cancellations. Likewise, they mention overdose deaths and social and economic determinants of health as if the broader health sector were oblivious to these or hadn't proposed any solutions. (The current government is quite conservative and broadly opposes overdose prevention, basic income experiments, social housing, etc., so these are unlikely to be realized, so perhaps this is a resigned ultra-realist approach, but in that case, why write it in the first place?)

A cynical part of me wonders whether this letter being circulated by CTV (as opposed to the motivations of those signing it, about which I have no idea) isn't just to give political cover on talk radio and TV news for the government's current wait-and-see approach, which health workers (and progressives generally) are against.

[Slightly unrelated, but potentially relevant given the "doctors say" headline: the government was recently playing radio advertisements explaining how much it "consulted" with the health sector on safely reopening schools but not mentioning the fact that it ignored the main recommendation of reducing class sizes.]