I used to believe the pandemic would end once COVID-19 stopped causing unpredictable waves of disease and began following a predictable pattern. I’ve now learned that’s just a scientific ending.

How naïve that was first became apparent in July 2022. That’s when Canada’s Long-Term-Care COVID-19 Tracker was forced to shut down after the provinces and territories had refused to share their data. Launched in April 2020, the tracker provided critical information on cases, outbreaks and deaths. It was the first to reveal that most of the deaths from COVID-19 were occurring in long-term-care facilities. It also provided information to the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Two months later, Ontario dissolved its Science Advisory Table, one of Canada’s — most trusted pandemic think-tanks. It too was a go-to source for a public anxious to understand the rapidly evolving science of COVID-19. Their reports had been comprehensive and easily understood. But it was also an independent body whose advice hadn’t always aligned with that of the government’s.

Both of these closures took place several months before the World Health Organization had announced that COVID-19 was no longer a global health emergency.

Another blow to understanding the spread of COVID-19 is now slated to happen on July 31. That’s when funding ends for Ontario’s extensive wastewater surveillance program. It’s a technology that can detect viral particles up to seven days before people develop symptoms. It costs $15 million annually to check 58 sites throughout Ontario. But the cost of losing this hard-won technology is far greater. No longer having its data means that hospitals, long-term-care facilities, schools and communities will lose critical advanced warning of a potential outbreak. That gives them less time to prepare with masks, air filtration and vaccines.

Ontario says it will instead rely on federal data. But that typically lags a full month behind provincial tracking systems. Is the provincial government unaware that Ottawa stopped reporting on national COVID trends as of June 11 because the provinces and territories again refused to share their data? Privacy reasons were cited. But when polled, four in five Canadians said they were willing to share their COVID histories, according to a 2022 study in BMJ Open. Even if they weren’t, such data could be easily anonymized. Instead, it remains locked up in electronic health records.

This comes at a time that vaccines have become far less effective against new variants and not nearly as long-lasting. Pfizer and Moderna’s XBB vaccines fortunately continue to protect people from severe disease, including hospitalization, but they do a poor job of preventing mild disease from new variants. This includes Canada’s latest FLiRT variants which carry mutations that make COVID even better at infecting cells and at evading immunity, whether it’s from vaccines or from having been infected.

COVID hospitalizations and deaths are at an all-time low right now so it’s tempting to become complacent. But COVID is still spreading in unpredictable waves and more cases give the novel Coronavirus further opportunities to mutate into variants that could become deadlier.

Surely this is not a good time for governments to be cutting funding to trackers, advisory boards and surveillance systems. Fatigue, hope and wishful thinking cannot end a pandemic, but it will blindfold us to its spread. We’ll be less likely to see the misery it brings to those not hospitalized, suffering in silence.

How pandemics really end has become a bit clearer to me over time. It’s not public health experts that make that determination, nor is it decided by a pandemic-fatigued population.

It turns out that the decision to end pandemics rests with governments. They ultimately decide when to muzzle scientists and shut down data collection. Ontario’s strategy is to turn a blind eye to long COVID and the later health harms that can accompany mild infections. The “plan” is to react to COVID hospitalizations and deaths only when required.

But turning the taps off on science is wishful thinking at best. Shutting down surveillance and defunding once-lauded scientists ignores the stealth of a devastating virus that continues to mutate and spread in unpredictable waves.

Iris Gorfinkel is a family physician and founder of PrimeHealth Clinical Research in Toronto.