It Ain't Over

Joe Biden says the pandemic is over. Millions of people agree with him. But COVID hasn't receded into the history books. Glen Pearson writes:

Covid-19 hasn’t receded into the past, and it likely never will.  The record of its effects on us has been brutal – 4.3 million cases with 45,648 deaths.  Ontario had the worst count (14,495), but every province and territory had fallen into the pandemic’s grip.  It has changed our outlook on life, perhaps forever.  How we view employment, the economy, our communities, our future, and even one another has left us unsure of how to proceed.  The old formulas no longer work, and the alternatives remain unclear.

It’s difficult to move on when new variants continue to fill our hospitals, and recent deaths are announced weekly.  Before the pandemic, we had received consistent warnings that things like Covid were not only possible but imminent.  We largely ignored those signs and blindly moved on.  We are now running the dangerous risk of adopting that attitude once more, individually, collectively, and institutionally.  While we may hope to get on with our daily pursuits, our health systems remain woefully underfunded, under-resourced, and under pressure every moment of the day while the Canadian population and its leaders continue to ignore both the potential and severity of future pandemics.

With the Canadian economy threatened by recession and two years of pandemic debts to be repaid, the funds required to bring our health systems up-to-speed will prove difficult to secure.  And with a partisan political climate more concentrated on theatrics than the efficient delivery of services, the chances of inter-party cooperation to deal with the health crisis are minimal at best.

Pandemics are not new. And experience has given us the knowledge to deal with them: 

This knowledge is second nature to us, but we have placed an increased distance between awareness of the threat and the steps necessary to reduce it.    Disease has a context, fed and manipulated by societal conditions neglected over time.  Permit social conditions to deteriorate or remain under-resourced, and the threat to human life will be inevitable.  Canada has learned this lesson well enough to lead the world in healthcare awareness.  But knowledge without action leads to eventual decline.  Failure to address the problem is to accept it, and to tolerate it is to fall prey to our lack of watchfulness.

Pandemics require societal responses. Unfortunately, we live in an age of unbridled individualism and magical thinking. And so it continues.

It ain't over.

Image: tvo.org

Pure Folly

Andrew Nikiforuk is furious. Our political leaders continue to live in a state of denial. He writes:

A biological transformative event, which may have killed nearly 20 million people by revised estimates and has burdened millions more with chronic illness, continues to burn through the world’s population.

Yet, although the authorities know that masking, ventilation, air filtration and isolating when sick can dampen this fire and protect the public health, they have inexplicably abandoned these tools.

Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, for instance, even banished an inadequate five-day protocol for isolating while sick and infectious. How’s that for “laissez-faire epidemiology”?

The chief medical officer made this bad decision at a time when, as the epidemiologist Larry Brilliant recently explained in Wired magazine, the BA.5 variant has vastly increased its viral reach “by being able to infect people who’ve had three doses of the vaccine or people who had COVID a month ago.”

Having surrendered all other public health options, the authorities now count on vaccines, whose effectiveness in the face of immune busting variants is steadily waning, to serve as our absolute defense against the disease. Expecting vaccines, already one step behind an evolving virus, to end the pandemic makes about as much sense as expecting bitcoin to end poverty in El Salvador.

Consider the numbers:

COVID has killed more than 14,317 Canadians since December 2021, a month dominated by the first Omicron wave. Or 24,230 if you include estimates of underreporting of COVID deaths — a chronic problem.

By the end of the year the number of dead will likely surpass the totals of the two previous years. Total Canadian COVID deaths calculated solely by year look like this: 13,791 in 2022 up till Sept. 5; 14,711 in 2021 and 15,606 in 2020.

Daily deaths from COVID (500 in the last two weeks) remain five times higher than average Canadian flu mortality.

Tara Moriarty, an infectious disease researcher at the University of Toronto, with associates, publishes an important COVID hazard index as a public health service. In August, Moriarty told us that more than half of Canada’s 190,585 COVID hospitalizations during the pandemic to date have occurred since last December.

Incredibly, one in every 402 people living in Canada has been hospitalized with a variant of Omicron since December 2021.

And we have decided to abandon COVID protocols? This is pure folly.

Image: follytheatre.org