This is not our work. There's a marvellous mathematician at Waterloo by the name of Chris Bauch who has a paper looking at regional reopening in Ontario as opposed to blanket policies, with the outcome of interest being how we can minimize the amount of time in lockdown.
I think some organic reopening is happening anyway as the weather gets better, and that's all right. This doesn't seem to be an infectious disease that spreads particularly well in parks or as people are out enjoying themselves, as long as they're maintaining a bit of distance. This disease really continues to show that it likes big crowds and indoor places. I think our most recent superspreader event here in Ontario was among greenhouse workers in Chatham, which fits the description to a T: 50 people were infected working in a greenhouse. When folks are in small groups and there's a low upper bound on the number of people they're working with—we call that “work bubbles”—or when folks are enjoying themselves outside to stay fit, going to parks or enjoying the outside with their kids, that generates minimal risk for us.
What we do need is good, strong surveillance systems—and this circles back to our initial conversation about testing—that let us know when we're getting into danger again, as we were in March. I do think we're going to struggle in the fall. Again, there's a lot of hindsight at this point. This thing emerged in January, but we didn't really get serious about it until March, and I think we're going through that again. Anyone who looks at disease dynamics for a living can tell you that we're in a lull now but the disease is probably going to be coming back in September or October. We have some golden time now to get prepared for a likely resurgence in the fall. I think we need to build those surveillance systems and get much better at this by the time we get to the fall, because we're going to have to be more nimble then. There's much we can do, and there's much we can do safely if we avoid large gatherings.
The bubble idea—and a lot of corporations have already instituted this— is simply that if you divide people up into relatively small teams, they don't work simultaneously in the office and there's a deep clean between when teams are in the office, you have an upper bound on how many people are going to get infected if someone comes into the bubble with infection.
I think there's a lot of ingenuity and a lot of wiggle room in reopening the economy safely, as long as we have the surveillance systems that allow us to see when we're getting back into trouble.