Justin Trudeau says Canada won’t release pandemic projections just yet as Doug Ford promises full disclosure by Friday

OTTAWA-Ontario is willing to show you what the federal government is not.

After refusing to release projections for how the COVID-19 pandemic could play out in the coming weeks, Premier Doug Ford is promising full disclosure while Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Canada won't release any potential scenarios until it's clearer which path the virus is likely to take.

At Queen's Park, Ford promised there will be a "full public briefing" by medical officials on Friday, with projections for the pandemic in the province that he warned will be "hard to hear."

It was an abrupt change of heart from one day earlier, when the premier declined to release projections and warned overestimating possible scenarios could "create a panic." But on Thursday, Ford said the government will share its projections in the name of transparency.

"I do not believe in holding back figures in this crisis," Ford told his daily news conference Thursday.

"I can't sleep at night thinking I have something and I'm not being transparent," he said.

Meanwhile, in Ottawa, Trudeau and federal officials stuck by the decision to keep national projections from the public until they are considered more accurate. Speaking outside Rideau Cottage, the prime minister said there is a "range of scenarios" for the pandemic in Canada, the worst of which he has previously described as "fairly dire."

But Trudeau said Thursday these projections need to be refined and clarified so that Canada has more "realistic models." He said the next step is to analyze raw numbers reported by health authorities every day and promised to release federal projections at an unspecified time in the coming days or weeks.

"People can imagine a range of scenarios that shows everything from everyone just suddenly gets better within the next few weeks, to the situation just keeps getting worse," Trudeau said.

"There is a range out there, and just highlighting that range is not as useful or important and being able to get clearer numbers and clearer analyses of what we are likely to face."

Trudeau added that the key variable in what trajectory Canada faces is whether people obey orders to stay at home and avoid close contact with others to slow the virus.

"Everything that we are going to face will be directly linked to how people behave today," he said.

Isaac Bogoch, an infectious diseases scientist at the University of Toronto, said there is no reason the government should rush out incomplete data when officials are working on models based on a fuller picture of the virus in Canada.

He said modelling the trajectory of diseases is a very complicated science that is essentially a field of its own, and that there are several different models the government could use to project the spread of the disease.

But "the key thing is transparency and openness, and it sounds like they're headed in that direction," he said, referring to Trudeau's pledge to release the government's models "soon."

"It's important to have transparency and honesty about what direction Canada is headed in, and look at the various trajectories, including the ones where we're doing OK, but also the ones where we're not doing OK - especially those ones because that might help drive more helpful behaviour by Canadians," Bogoch said.

This week, officials in the United States detailed stark projections for the number of Americans that could die from the pandemic in the coming months. U.S. government scientists estimated the virus could kill 100,000 to 240,000 people in the country, as President Donald Trump said he wants "every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead."

New Zealand has published the models for the pandemic that it is using to plan its response, noting that each projection comes with "its own degree of uncertainty."

And in British Columbia, officials presented a detailed range of projections for the virus on March 27. The projections included a "likely" scenario for the pandemic in B.C., as well as statistics on the number of critical-care beds and ventilators, with caveats about how the "curve" for the province's health-care needs will become clearer with time.

At the federal level, health officials said Thursday that they aren't prepared to release models for national pandemic scenarios because they need more data for projections and are still working on how to interpret the information they have.

"It's still actually early days," said Theresa Tam, Canada's chief public health officer, pointing to the need for more information about the testing strategy in B.C., and to figure out how to compare data from different jurisdictions.

"What we're doing is fine-tuning the interpretation of our information," she said.

Deputy Chief Public Health Officer Howard Njoo added that the holdup for the federal government is about the speed at which data is being gathered at the local level and filtered up through the provinces to national health authorities.

In Ontario, there was still a testing backlog of just over 2,000 cases Thursday, which could be cleared by the weekend. There are also discrepancies between the tally for deaths from COVID-19 at the provincial level and those published by regional health authorities, the Star reported this week.

The federal government also has an incomplete picture of the pandemic in this country. The government's daily reportage of the disease on Thursday had hospitalization data - which shows how many people are in critical care - for 57 per cent of the confirmed cases in Canada. It also showed gender and age information for just 62 per cent of cases.

At the Ontario level, officials were cautioning just one day before Ford's pledge of transparency that the province is still in the early phase of the pandemic, and that small changes to the number of infections can have huge impacts on the models that project future scenarios for the virus. Chief medical officer Dr. David Williams said his epidemiologists have been working late crunching the latest numbers to come out with a range of scenarios from best to worst case depending on how closely people follow physical distancing and other measures to slow the spread.

Alex Ballingall is an Ottawa-based reporter covering national politics. Follow him on Twitter: @aballinga

Rob Ferguson is a Toronto-based reporter covering Ontario politics. Follow him on Twitter: @robferguson1