Human beings are flawed. Two of our most glaring weaknesses are our collective short term memory and our inability to think long term. Alan Freeman writes:
It’s unbelievable how quickly human memory fades. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 was horrific, killing tens of millions across the globe. But it quickly receded from collective memory, overwhelmed by the loss and grief that had resulted from the First World War and the need to rebuild society. And within two decades, there was another world war. The Spanish Flu became a relic, its lessons forgotten except by some historians or epidemiologists.
More recently, outbreaks like SARS in 2003 and Ebola a few years ago grabbed headlines, then faded. Politicians who had vowed big changes moved on and their successors were preoccupied with other pressing issues. Public health officials may have continued to make their case for better preparation, but it became harder to convince the public of the immediacy of the danger.
And, when we try to plan for the future, we plan for the last disaster:
As with war, the next conflict is never the same as the last one. The financial crisis this time is completely different, sparked by a societal crisis, not the fundamental soundness of the financial system. Some of the reforms from post-2008 will help but many are irrelevant.
In her 2017 annual report as Ontario auditor-general, Bonnie Lysyk reported that the province’s health ministry had a stockpile of 26,000 pallets of supplies for medical emergencies, including respirators, face shields and needles that had been purchased at a cost of $45 million, presumably after the SARS outbreak. Eighty per cent of the supplies had reached their expiry date.
The report said that the vast majority of these supplies hadn’t been used in the health care system before expiry because the budget “only allowed for storage and not for management of them.” But the ministry didn’t even throw out these supplies. It was continuing to store them at a cost of $3 million a year. How that was cheaper than using the supplies is my big question.
What’s interesting here is that the auditor-general saw this solely as a waste of money and didn’t deal with the fact that the stockpile, which had been created for a reason, had become essentially useless.
So instead of creating a system for a stockpile to deal with emergencies, with constant renewal of the supplies to make sure nothing went to waste and updating them to make sure it was current, the stockpile was regarded as a one-time event that was easily forgotten.
Those two faults -- short memories and the inability to genuinely deal with the future -- are abundantly on display once again.
The old folk song, Where Have All The Flowers Gone? asks the eternal question, "When Will They Ever Learn?"
