Hospitals are on the edge Public Health needs help communicating We're out of time for pep talks

Re: The public health messaging: fear as a last resort, Oct. 6.

Kelly Egan's experience in hospital on Sept. 6 and 17 was in stark contrast to my experience in hospital from Sept. 28 to Oct. 1.

In a matter of two to three weeks, the situation has changed markedly.

While in the ER, I passed a dozen people who were spending at least one night in the hallway. I overheard one nurse saying that she had never seen it that bad. Subsequent to the ER, I was treated for two days on a very full ward.

I discovered when I returned home that hospital capacity was 100 per cent. A tweet by hospital ER physician Dr. Ian Stiell urged the government to find long-term care beds immediately for the 20 per cent of in-patients at the hospital occupying beds who did not require acute hospital care.

Egan asks when hospitals are not at 100-per-cent capacity.

Reporting in media over the past months indicated that hospital capacity had been low for a while and that many patients were not accessing the ER even though doctors were saying it was safe to do so. Things have changed suddenly and that is what is causing great concern among health care providers.

Dr. Vera Etches' messaging has not been scolding, as Egan suggests. She has consistently provided the facts in an even and encouraging way.

Her messaging has changed over the last few days only to reflect the seriousness of the situation.

Kelly Egan reasonably questioned “a public health message that essentially tries to scare the daylights out of everyone.”

We should not be surprised; that has been the approach taken by public health officers based in Ottawa since the early days of COVID-19.

Egan is right about losing the room. Alastair Crerar wrote that the “development of public trust is like the development of soil. Topsoil accumulates in millimetres per year, while centimetres can be lost in a single day on the Prairies.” Etches has blown away the few remaining centimetres in my corner.

One of your letter-writers recently identified a failure of communication with the younger generation. Egan has identified a failure of communication with older generations.

Public health officers have an extraordinarily difficult job and after half a year of non-stop endeavour, must be exhausted.

They do need some urgent help in communicating with the public.

John Hollins, Gloucester

Certain messages to the public sometimes have to take on a more forceful tone to convey urgency. So hats off to Dr. Vera Etches for saying, “This a critical turning point.”

We are at a critical point: There are still a great number of people who fail to follow simple rules. This devil-may-care attitude is taxing our health system and cannot but hinder our recovery.

Sorry, Kelly Egan, but we have run out of the “pep talks” that you refer to in your article. These kinds of talks have seemed to have lost their effectiveness, as it is obvious that so many people out there are still blatantly disregarding others by not being proactive with protection.

If they were doing what is right in order to protect all of us, our COVID-19 numbers would be going down, not up.

If fines must be brought in to hit the offenders in their pocketbooks, perhaps this is an option.

It is similar to getting a parking ticket in a no parking zone — you were the one who parked there. Take responsibility for your actions.

Sheila Logan, Ottawa