We can't go inside yet

It sounds like the tagline for the world’s lamest horror movie: Just when you thought it was safe to go back to your spin class…

But last week, a single fitness studio in Hamilton, Ontario, was linked to more than 72 positive cases of COVID-19, with an additional 2,500 people potentially exposed. What’s shocking is that the gym seemingly did almost everything right: six-foot distancing, 50 percent capacity, screening customers, a robust sanitizing regime. “This is not about how well the gym was run; this is about how COVID spreads,” Colin Furness, an infection control epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, explained to The Spec. “If you let people hangout together, without masks, sharing air, in the same space for a prolonged period of time … this was going to happen anyways.”

Just look at Europe, where the World Health Organization is reporting “exponential increases” in cases, and warns that the daily death toll could balloon to five times what it was during the peak in April. It appears that the spike there, too, is linked to increased indoor activity — like the Hamilton spin studio outbreak, but on a macro scale. For the moment, the United States has a brief respite from being the rest of the world’s cautionary tale about what not to do during a pandemic, but the message we’re receiving from overseas is abundantly clear: it isn’t safe yet to go back indoors.