When Things Get Tough

Doug Ford is about to issue a stay-at-home order. Bruce Arthur writes:

But now here we are. The province’s magical thinking, its hunger for short-term economic gains, its hostility to science, and a profound lack of leadership have led us here. It could get as ugly as almost anything Ontario has seen in the pandemic.

"I mean, the thing that strikes me most is that people have been predicting this since January,” says Dr. Ashleigh Tuite, epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, who has contributed to several science table briefs. “The fact that it’s not like this snuck up on us. To me, that’s the strange part. It’s not like this came out of nowhere. It was quite predictable. I always say this about modelling: it’s not necessarily quantitatively right on, but the broad contours were there, and they were there since January.

“And as soon as we identified the B.1.1.7 variants, as soon as we saw that they had increased, projecting what would happen was predictable. You didn’t have to be a sophisticated mathematical modeller to make those conclusions. You could just draw a straight line — not a straight line, an exponentially increasing line.

“At this point of the pandemic, you don’t need models. You can look at the data in front of you and understand what’s happening. Or you should be able to understand what’s happening. That there’s this surprise and inability to understand what’s happening is the surprising part.”

We're in a really nasty place:

I hope the province is panicking because it might understand the worst is coming to pass. They can shift the vaccination plan to focus more on hot spots, which might mean mobile units at outbreak sites, might mean lowering the age limit in harder-hit postal codes, might mean pouring water on the hottest fires. That would be good.

But right now it’s clear there is no plan. There is just salvage.

Ford is a salesman. But he's no manager. A retired friend of mine comes from Cape Breton. He tells me there is a phrase there that describes Ford: "He can't manage a line to a two-hole outhouse."

This is when things get tough.

Image: Cottage Life

Second Place

COVID numbers are rising sharply in Ontario. Which raises the question, "Who is directing the province's response to the pandemic?" Bruce Arthur writes:

As the pandemic has progressed in Ontario, Doug Ford has made a show of deferring to his medical advisers, and two above all. Dr. David Williams, the much-criticized chief medical officer of health, and the health command table. Those are far from his only medical advisers; they are, however, the ones he mentions most.

Ford loves to mention his health command table, but the province refuses to name the participants, and Ford has, too, when asked. Unlike the public health advice in all 34 public health units in the province, no provincial-level public health advice — from Public Health Ontario, the health table, the health measures table, or the other advisory tables that feed into the health table — is ever made public.

Which means the health table acquired a sort of mythic quality. But while the premier might cite it as a reason to do or not do things, multiple sources insist it is not pulling the strings, or pushing things forward. It is primarily made up of government officials from a wide range of ministries and sources, and a few outside advisers.

As is the case south of the border, politics are calling the shots:

One source familiar with the process says the table primarily gets recommendations from the ministry, and discusses them, but “you can’t really have a decision-making body with 80 people on a phone call when you don’t know who’s there.”

But the decision on moving Toronto, Peel and Ottawa back into Stage 2 last week was driven more by the health measures table, which consists of seven current and former medical officers of health. One source familiar with the process was asked who is really directing Ontario’s epidemic response. They said: “Doug Ford.” 

Which, on the face of it, isn't surprising. But, when push comes to shove, I suspect that science and medicine take second place in Ford's calculations.

Image: Huffington Post