As lockdowns ease across Canada, we face case-by-case decisions about which activities are low-risk and which simply aren’t worth the risk. In recent weeks, Quebec Premier François Legault and now Ontario Premier Doug Ford have berated sun-starved Canadians for enjoying the warm weather in public parks.
Critics have countered that studies find extremely low rates of outdoor transmission. One working paper from Japan estimated open-air environments are about 20 times safer than indoors. Another working paper found only a single case of outdoor transmission out of 7,324 transmissions studied.
Still, we obviously want to make decisions with the best available data. Late last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the leading U.S. health agency for infectious diseases, released a dramatic downward revision to their estimate of COVID-19 fatality rates.
The CDC now expects that COVID-19 will be fatal in just 0.2 to 0.3 per cent of cases, only two to three times higher than seasonal flu mortality, which averages about 0.1 per cent. This revision is an order of magnitude lower than the CDC’s March 27 estimate of up to 3.4 per cent fatality, which the World Health Organization (WHO) was also estimating at the time the lockdowns were originally implemented across Canada.
[…]
