I think what you're referring to was our paper in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, CMAJ, in March. Our model looks a lot like most other models by competent modelling groups. It looks like the publication by a guy named Steve Kissler, in Science, that happened about a month after.
What we projected was that reducing transmission through a variety of means can knock down the reproduction number of the disease and prevent intensive care units from overflowing. Something we learned.... We didn't really anticipate that a lot of deaths in Ontario would come in the long-term care facilities. We knew that long-term care facilities were vulnerable, but we assumed, as we were doing our modelling, that people would try to protect them, which turned out not to be the case.
What we've found is that various combinations of case identification with contact tracing or straight physical distancing are sufficient to knock the reproduction number down enough that ICUs don't overflow. This has been the case in Canada, which is wonderful.
Moving forward, we now have a second iteration of that model in press, in a journal called Annals of Internal Medicine. Thanks to the provincial modelling table, we've been able to calibrate the model. That means we've fit the model to real data. We couldn't do that beforehand because we didn't have an epidemic to fit it to. We can fit it to ICU occupancy in Ontario and can fit it to hospital deaths. The long-term care stuff is very challenging to try to fit into any sort of model. What we see is that, basically, the lower disease activity goes and the slower we reopen, the longer it will be before we have a resurgence.
In our paper in March, in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, my colleague, Dr. Ashleigh Tuite, who I've referenced previously and is a brilliant modeller, came up with the idea of dynamic social distancing, which depends on really good public health surveillance, so that you know when your hospital is starting to fill up again and when you have to strengthen distancing measures. I really think the group at Harvard, who we're friends with, may have copied that from us. That came out in the Science paper as well a couple of weeks later. It's this idea—and journalists refer to it as surfing the wave—that we're likely to go up and down and up and down with this disease for a while until we have a vaccine, which may come sooner than I ever would have imagined.