I've been impressed by Doug Ford's response to the coronavirus pandemic. But Martin Regg Cohn has me rethinking my evaluation. Ford's Achilles Heel -- like the Mighty Moron's south of the border -- is testing:
He has not measured up. Ford has been unable to keep his promise to roll out mass testing — neither when it was needed desperately this month to save lives, nor when needed massively next month to safeguard an economic recovery.
Despite Ford’s public excuses and frequent pledges to catch up, Ontario still lags most of the country and much of the world in testing for the novel coronavirus. Overwhelmed by the spread into nursing homes, where the death toll has surged unconscionably high, we are finally targeting the elderly and caregivers for priority testing — the right decision, given the continuing shortage of testing materials.
Ontario's inability to test has led to tragic consequences:
Overwhelmed by the spread into nursing homes, where the death toll has surged unconscionably high, we are finally targeting the elderly and caregivers for priority testing — the right decision, given the continuing shortage of testing materials.
Before opening up our economy, we need metrics to judge our success. And we still lack those metrics.
Image: Klipfolio
4 comments:
Regg Cohn correctly identifies the problem: "the continuing shortage of testing materials." This isn't Ford's fault, it's a failure of the private sector free market economy. There's a shortage of swabs and reagents because minimizing inventories maximizes profits. There is no slack in the system and manufacturing monopolies and oligopolies are allowed to dominate supply chains. Until governments accept that capitalism, especially the neoliberal version, regularly fails society, we cannot move to a better alternative.
Cap
Point well taken Cap. For fifty years we have lived with the myth that The Market is The Great Rationalizer. The Market can produce totally irrational outcomes.
Nations that stand out for their ability to "tame" the pandemic all credit two things - testing and tracking. They test a lot of the public and, when they find someone positive, they isolate that person and begin tracking where they've been, who they've been in contact with, over the interval in which they had to have contracted the virus. Then they go out to those contacts and test them, clearing most but also identifying other links in the contagion chain.
Testing is expensive but tracking is costly and time consuming. Yet it works wherever it has been tried. It's tried and tested.
There shouldn't be a nursing/extended care facility that's not regularly tested. There's no excuse for neglect.
The virus has exposed the weaknesses in our nursing home system, Mound. And seniors are paying for those weaknesses with their lives.
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