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Ontario premier has every right to be concerned

When Ontario Premier Doug Ford called the province’s level of testing for COVID-19 “unacceptable” this week, it marked an unwelcome anniversary of sorts: exactly three weeks earlier, Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott had characterized the length of time it was taking to get coronavirus test results back as “not acceptable.”

Promises were made on both days that Ontario would get its act together on testing. The promises made on March 18 have certainly been broken. Elliott told us then that she expected Ontario to be doing 5,000 tests a day by the end of that week. If that had happened, the province would have done more than 85,000 tests in those intervening three weeks. Instead, it has done just over 85,000 tests in the three months since it started keeping track back in January.

But what about the new promises, made this week, that Ontario will be doing 13,000 tests a day going forward? Those were bold words on a week during which the province had managed an average of 3,200 tests a day, yet 13,000 is not at all an unreasonable target if the plan is to get control of the COVID-19 outbreaks in long-term care facilities and retirement residences, to say nothing of the rest of Ontario.

It would be nice to think that these latest assurances will prove more reliable than those that came before them. But there’s little reason for confidence when the team of leaders tasked with making this happen is still not unified on the importance of testing.

On the same day that Premier Ford expressed his frustration with how slow Ontario has been in testing for COVID-19 — the province boasts one of the lowest testing rates in Canada — Dr. David Williams, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, said he saw no value in comparing per capita testing rates among provinces. “It’s not a matter of who looks better,” Williams said. “It’s a matter of how collectively we’re doing on a Canadian basis.”

Maybe that’s the only thing a province near the bottom of the list of competent and effective testers can say. However, it glosses over the fact that collectively we’d be doing far better on a Canadian basis if the most populous province in the country could get its act together.

What is Canada’s

COVID-19 infection rate? What is its death rate? We don’t know because Ontario has tested only about 0.06 per cent of its population, a per capita testing rate of 600 people per 100,000. In comparison, Alberta has tested about 1.6 per cent of its population, a per capita testing rate of 1,600 people per 100,000.

Again, it’s hard to imagine the situation in Ontario improving when not all the leaders are on the same page.

“No more excuses,” Premier Ford said. “We need to start doing 13,000 (tests) every day. I want to see every single long-term care facility tested, every patient … every front-line health worker in this province tested.”

Yet on the same day, Williams said that, “Testing for the sake of testing and just racking up numbers … is not only a poor use of resources, it distracts you from getting the task done.”

The premier made it clear that testing is the task. He wants his top health officials to do whatever it takes to test more people. What task is occupying Williams’ time? What task does he think takes precedence over mounting an effective response to the pandemic, which cannot be done without adequate testing? What part of Ford’s directive did Williams not understand, and what price will we all pay for it?

A lot of very smart and responsible people have made major mistakes in their response to the spread of the coronavirus. The truly smart and responsible among them have plainly acknowledged their errors, then adjusted their course appropriately.

Ford said, “We’re going to learn from the past mistakes, and we’re going to move forward.” Then Williams said that he didn’t interpret Ford’s comments as any kind of reprimand for the way Ontario’s testing has been handled. “I didn’t see it as ‘taking to the woodshed’ myself,” Williams said, using an old phrase for punishing someone in private.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. There’s no need to dwell on past mistakes — or to inflict corporal punishment on a naughty child, as the “woodshed” saying originally implied — but the people who did something wrong do need to at least know that they did something wrong, otherwise they will keep repeating the same blunders.

It’s admirable of Ford to declare himself solely responsible for Ontario’s testing failure. But if we truly want to turn things around, a “taking to the woodshed” moment for the province’s highest health officials wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

Doug Ford