Send more doses to the hotspots

Views from around the world. These opinions are not necessarily shared by newspapers.

After the emergency brake, the panic button. How else to explain the Ford government’s latest confused, scattershot reaction to Ontario’s third-wave Covid crisis? The government is again taking action when it’s already too late to head off a terrifying increase in new cases and hospitalisations. Public health experts have been warning of something like this since at least mid-February, yet the government kept doing the least it thought it could get away with, until Premier Doug Ford himself admitted on Friday that ‘‘we’re losing the battle’’ and imposed even tighter restrictions.

It’s now clear Ontario has no effective plan to deal with the actual sources of the third wave – so-called hotspot areas that have seen outbreaks involving hundreds of people. On Friday, Ford said the province plans to increase vaccine doses going to hotspots by 25 per cent. But if 80 per cent of cases are coming from just 20 per cent of the province, why not send a much greater share to those areas? Like, say, 80 per cent? Ford called it an ‘‘inferno’’ – if that’s the case, why not turn the fire hoses directly on the heart of the blaze?

It would be politically hard to tell other regions their 60 and 70-year-olds will have to wait longer. But it would be the right thing to do if the province is serious about choking off the third wave.