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Okay, you guys win.

No more masks. No more vaccinations. No more social distancing. No more vaccine passports.

Get rid of ’em all. You win.

Whether you’re a freedomer up in Ottawa, with your kids tucked beside some Jerry cans of diesel in the cab of your truck, or if you’re a Liberal backbencher nobody has heard of before and who decided to speak up only after concluding you’re unlikely to ever be in cabinet, you win. We give up.

Just forget what millions of doctors and nurses have been saying about COVID-19 — about how transmissible it is, how it’s a shape-shifter virus, one that requires us to accept that it can’t be beaten overnight.

About how it is so deadly — killing at least six million people so far — and how it has made more than 400 million people really, really sick.

Forget about all that. Forget, too, that the real experts — not the ones on Twitter with a Viking for a profile picture, and the name “Freedom” followed by a lot of numbers — sound scared, really scared, that we are pretending that the war against COVID is won.

When it isn’t, and when it has killed at least 35,000 men, women and children in Canada so far — the equivalent of the entire population of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, or Grand Prairie, Alberta, where the governments just lifted basic pandemic protections.

Forget about all that. Forget, as well, what it does to you when you get it — which you still really, really could. The chances of which are greater than ever before, because we’re apparently getting rid of masks and vaccines and mandates.

There’s three stages to it, really, when you get COVID.

Sandra Pearce is an American respiratory specialist. She’s been on the front lines of caring for patients with COVID since the beginning.

Here’s what she says you can expect.

In the first stage, Pearce says symptoms range from mild to severe — and can include fever, chills, cough, shortness of breath, fatigue, muscle or body aches, headache, loss of taste or smell, sore throat, congestion, runny nose, nausea or vomiting, and diarrhea.

Half the time, she says, people are asymptomatic, meaning they are spreading the disease without even knowing it.

In the second stage, the virus has crept into your lungs, freedom fighters, and it causes pneumonia. That’s when you will have trouble breathing, chest pain and even confusion.

“When you’re constantly coughing and can’t take deep breaths, your oxygen level can decrease,” Pearce says.

At this stage, she’s seen a lot of people who can’t even walk across the room without getting winded. COVID is starting to kill them.

Stage three is the worst, of course, but all those truckers and nobody MPs in Ottawa know better.

In stage three, Sandra Pearce says, your body starts to shut down. This is the stage when your lungs go into what is called a hyperinflammatory response, which usually leads to sepsis and total organ failure. It’s ugly. It’s painful.

Often, in this stage, they’ll put you on a ventilator because you can’t breathe on your own anymore. Sometimes they’ll stick a tube through your rib cage, because too much pressure has built up in your lungs.

“This is when we call your family because it may be the last time you’re able to talk to them,” Sandra Pearce says.

She adds: “I’ve cried. It’s hard to watch when they are close to the end.”

But those folks up in Ottawa — waving Confederate flags and swastikas, and blaring their horns all day and all night, and pissing on the War Memorial — they know better than experts like Sandra Pearce. They say it’s a hoax, or it’s overblown, or it’s Justin Trudeau’s way of controlling all of us for a Great Reset or One World Government. Something like that.

So they’ve won. Because they’re afraid to get a little needle. Because they don’t like a little bit of inconvenience. Because they are disinterested in treating the lives of friends and family with reverence. Even though life should always be revered.

So, you’ve won. Get rid of the masks. Get rid of vaccines. Get rid of the things we know help to protect us and those we love. Get rid of all of that.

And when you are in an intensive care unit in a hospital somewhere, drowning in your own bodily fluids, gasping your final breath, someone like Sandra Pierce will be looking down on you. And she will be crying.

But me? I won’t be.

— Warren Kinsella was chief of staff to a federal minister of health

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Ottawa has declared a state of emergency. Police are parading in riot gear. Laws are being broken. Protesters are being arrested.

Does any of that mean anything?

Not really. Not until governments and police make the decision to do something significant and real. And, so far, all that is significant and real is the unravelling of the career of Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly. He’s been an unmitigated disaster.

So, what happens if — as many usually peace-loving Ottawans clearly want — the cops start swinging batons and cracking heads?

Ten points to consider, mainly drawn from the recent post-riot, post-occupation experience of American police forces.

The Americans remind us that the key thing is preparation — by police, by government, by the relevant authorities. This clearly didn’t happen in Ottawa.

Preparation isn’t something — it’s everything. The key is always to have police tactical plans well-thought-out — and well before the protest starts. Ottawa cops simply didn’t do that.

Training exercises help cops. They help to protect people, too — those exercising their constitutional rights, civilians who live in the protest zones, and the officers themselves. And in Ottawa, as noted, that didn’t happen either.

Ten points.

1) Dozens of U.S. studies show us that a lack of adequate planning and preparation causes the police to be reactive, rather than proactive. The American experience has repeatedly shown the need for planning, logistics, training, and police command-and-control supervision. Given the chaos and criminality reigning in the nation’s capital, it’s obvious that the police have lost control.

2) Escalation by police usually leads to more confrontations and violence. It just does. Putting police in military-style gear is usually how escalation happens. And militarization — dressing up like combat troops, basically — is usually a big mistake. It puts otherwise peaceful protesters on edge and often makes them combative. De-escalation keeps everyone — protesters and police — safer.

3) Any law enforcement response to an occupation situation has to be measured and proportionate, and take steps to avoid — even accidentally — heightening tensions and making things a lot worse. In Ottawa, it very much looks like too little response is about to become too much response.

4) So, proportionality: Police need to tailor that response to the actions and mood of the crowd, and should always try to avoid increasing tensions by using more gear and equipment than necessary. British police have found that mixing with rowdy soccer fans in non-military attire works well.

5) Police agencies need to always, always clearly and unambiguously communicate the thresholds for arrest. They need to give warnings to demonstrators when they breaking the law and about to be arrested. And arrests, of course, should only happen where there is probable cause that a crime has been committed. That itself is the law.

6) A protest is not a riot. But neither is an occupation a garden-variety protest. Police know what to do in riots. The Occupy Movement, which I wrote a book about, showed the need for different tactics in occupation situations. Behaviour of protesters is almost always determined by how they are treated by police.

7) Police need to meet with the protest leadership, regularly. Listen, empathize. Take down the temperature however and whenever possible. This is what the Americans call the Madison Method, and it works. Now, because demonstrations may be spontaneous and groups may not have identified leaders, cops should use social media for outreach and communication. Has Ottawa done that? Doesn’t look like it.

8) Some protesters believe that violence is morally defensible. Those people need to be quickly identified and detained and thereafter prosecuted. At the same time, reaching out to the majority who are always nervous about confrontation and violence is essential. Police need to keep those people from siding with the radicals. Isolate and remove the hotheads.

9) That means this: Police often treat all protesters the same, but they just shouldn’t. They should be trained to differentiate between peaceful protesters and violent troublemakers. That can be hard to do when there’s chaos. But it has to be done.

10) Intelligence is key. Lack of good intel leads to policing problems — poor coordination, inconsistency and confusion. Which almost always ends in violence. Good intel in Ottawa was non-existent, or next to nothing.

Ottawa is at a proverbial crossroads. More chaos and bloody violence is one road. The other road is de-escalation and a peaceful end to an illegal occupation.

It’s not a consideration for the police, but it is for the civilians who oversee them: Leaders need to step up here, more than they have.

Leaders — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the chief of police — can meet with protest leaders. They should. It won’t resolve everything, but it will give the protesters the feeling they’ve achieved something, and it may hasten their departure. It may lead to a peaceful conclusion, too.

Ottawa needs that. Now.

— Warren Kinsella is a former police reporter. His book about the Occupy Movement, Fight the Right, has been reissued by Random House.

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