One step forward and two steps backward. When it comes to COVID, that's the pattern. Ontario is once again repeating that pattern. Bruce Arthur writes:
Four days after the chief medical officer of health presented a plan to reopen physical schools, schools are back online for at least two weeks. Nineteen days after Premier Doug Ford said the province would not use lockdowns to defeat this wave, restaurants are closed again, bars, gyms, lots more.
It was too late and it might not matter enough, and we may not be able to tell just how much it does matter. Omicron could be so widespread that attempts to stop it are buckets in the ocean. Testing already crashed. There are a lot more cases than we see.
Premier Doug Ford looked shaken, like a man who had just gotten bad news; Ford then claimed he had made a decisive decision, three weeks after U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson had called this wave a tsunami. It wasn’t clear what exactly changed in the past four days, but something did.
What changed was the realization of just how transmissible the OMICRON variant is:
There was the hope Omicron would be mild, despite warnings about the comparative youth and immunity wall in South Africa, and despite a warning that Omicron needed to be 10 times as weak as Delta to make up for the speed of transmission. There was the worn old hope that cases would not translate to hospitalizations, and then that hospitalizations would not hit the ICU. Lagging indicators can lag slower, but they still lag.
And we did get lucky; just not lucky enough. The science table’s modelling in mid-December overshot Omicron’s severity, though it clearly explained why: that was the best data at the time. According to table scientific director Dr. Peter Jüni, Omicron appears at the moment to have 50 per cent of the hospitalization risk of Delta and 25 per cent of its ICU hazard. Vaccine protection against severe outcomes is holding and previous infection helps too. These are gifts.
But there are already too many cases, too fast. Monday’s 1,232 hospitalizations were triple the number from one week earlier. ICU admissions were 15 a week ago and 40 Sunday. Up to 10,000 non-emergency surgeries are being cancelled, including some heart and cancer surgeries; that should have been the line the province moved to preventively protect. Hospitals are already in crisis, with William Osler Health System calling its first pandemic-related Code Orange Monday and transferring patients to other hospitals for the first time in the Omicron wave. They won’t be alone for long.
It's not a case -- as the libertarians would have it -- of give me liberty or give me death. It's a case of give me enough hospital beds -- please.
We'll see if we'll have enough beds -- and enough people to staff them.
Image: Saanich News
14 comments:
We all saw this coming before the break. They told us (teachers and students) to bring everything home, but then did nothing else to prevent the surge. He could have shut down gyms and theatres and provided curb-side pick up ONLY at all stores and restaurants to curb the wave while students were home for 2 weeks, but he didn't. It wouldn't be good for the economy. Imagine if he said, Dec. 17, that we'd all be teaching online for the month of January. Parents and teachers would have two weeks to prepare. Instead, we found out Monday at 11am that we're pivoting THIS WEEK. It's so frustrating how much COULD have been done, but wasn't. If he says ANYTHING about an improved unemployment rate coming up to June 2, then he's a monster capitalizing on the massive death toll to improve his stats. /endrant
We all know the drill by now:
Step 1. We don't know how this will play out, let's not overreact.
Step 2. Holy crap, look at those case numbers, the healthcare system will collapse!
Step 3. School closures, lockdowns, etc.
Step 4. Case numbers are going down, we must have overreacted.
Step 5. We did it! Let's just return to normal.
Rinse and repeat.
I guess it still beats the "let 'er rip" approach of Kenney and Moe, but at some point we're going to have to implement reasonable preventative approaches to avoid the roller-coaster. Kinda like how we don't worry much about cholera outbreaks because we built sewers and pipes to separate shit from drinking water.
Cap
I think a lot about you and your colleagues these days, Marie. It has got to be utterly frustrating to teach in the public schools of Ontario.
The entire approach is reactive, Cap. Doug is not a creative thinker.
I am very empathic toward teachers and students, very. After listening to Ford yesterday, I could not help but feel sooooooo relieved that I am no longer teaching in a place like Ontario or Alberta….for that matter, any Conservative province but retired. Do these people have rocks in their head? Anyong
I don't know about rocks, Anyong. But I do know that what's missing is empathy.
.. The REALITY.. is blowing sky high
Fundamentally, Ontarions & the rest of Canada need to realize we have absolutely no idea How or Where the ‘Appraisal / Decision Process’ of the Doug Ford ‘conservative’ Majority Government or that of Alberta’s Jason Kenney actually occurs
The term ‘Pivot’ essentially implies a starting point with two feet on the ground.. neither Provincial Premier seems capable of proving they have such a basis or starting point. All they seem to have is some vague & ethereal ‘Ideological / Magical / Economic Theory’ plus a sort of secret squirrel’Strategy Based On Hope’
Also Fundamentally .. They’ve proved they don’t care if they kill us, sicken us, bankrupt us.. they will gamble that they can bluff or lie their way out of their criminal negligence - PLUS ! - get re-elected and hold on for a total of 8 years
BBC radio this morning had a report out of the World Health Organization that Omicron will not be the last hurrah of the Covid pandemic. Even BC's medical officer of health, Bonnie Henry, said that Omicron will die out and Covid will then become endemic. Not so, according to the WHO which reports it's already studying three major variants that have not yet entered mass circulation.
With three major variants over two years - Alpha, Delta and Omicron, I had trouble understanding why Omicron heralded the end of pandemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2#Alpha_(lineage_B.1.1.7)
We're familiar with the term "Covid fatigue" but that may have spread to our healthcare leadership. The West's failure to flood the Third World with vaccines can only allow new variants to emerge. How badly do we want out of this?
Both premiers assume they know what they're doing, sal. The reality is that they're clueless.
Good question, Mound. This won't end until the entire world is vaccinated.
The Next varient is called the “Cameroon”?? Anyong
I think I understand why Ontario voters made a collective decision to go ABL (anyonebutlib) but they had to know the history of the Fords, did they not? Why not go for a minority to give him a chance to blow it in fine Ford fashion or demonstrate that he really wasn't the incarnation of brother Rob? A minority government would have been a perfect response. In order to retain power in a future election, he would have listened to some saner minds that existed in the opposition parties and kept him out of the quagmire he's got himself into.
As opposed to "Jeneral" Jason of Alabamberta, Doug does draw some sympathy when puts that hang dog look on his face when trying to explain another failure, but jeebus, have Ontarians not learned yet that you don't give a Ford a massive majority in his first crack at running a province, which despite Alabamberta's challenge of being the major financier of the whole country, is still a massive economic engine of Canada. Jeesh!!!!
My wife worked in Cameroon for two years, Anyong, and came home with malaria. There are lots of diseases out there.
Ontarians should have no better, Lulymay. But they were more angry than rational. There should be a lesson there.
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