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
