The province’s statistics provide COVID-19 hope
When it came to death, Josef Stalin certainly knew a thing or two.
Courtesy of such first-hand knowledge came wisdom. So, when Stalin declared a single death a tragedy while a million is simply a statistic, he spoke from bloody experience.
Today, recognizing this brutal truth during these uneasy times, we should separate ourselves from the emotional pull of these sad stories of unfortunate deaths in this COVID-19 pandemic and, instead, become clear-eyed and objective. After all, we’re not playing for small stakes here. Our future is at stake.
Of course, any attempt at objectivity risks being branded heartless by those standing resolutely beneath the ‘every life is sacred’ banner. But if we don’t, there’s a danger of encouraging today’s authoritarian overreach to be entrenched forever while simultaneously losing the simple joys of life to unreasonable fear.
Today, the avalanche of global statistics mapping every country’s ranking of tests, infections, recoveries and deaths during this pandemic is overwhelming. Plus, nations use different criteria: Russia will only count a COVID-19 fatality after an autopsy confirms it while Belgium includes anyone even suspected of succumbing to the virus in its death tally. Not surprisingly, fatality ratios vary widely.
So we need to mover closer to home in attempting to understand the deadliness of this pandemic. There’s little doubt it spreads like wildfire, so measures such as social distancing and societal lockdown have successfully slowed the spread which, in turn, has given health authorities room to manoeuvre in providing adequate beds for treatment.
But there’s a huge difference between getting sick and dropping dead. And on that latter scorecard, COVID-19 hasn’t been as viciously fatal as feared four months ago.
For near-at-hand evidence look to the outbreak at Cargill’s meat-packing plant in High River. (My first full-time job was in a slaughterhouse — pigs and sheep being the unfortunate animals dispatched back then. And I doubt whether conditions are all that much improved today, 45 years later. So, I know where my sympathies sit, if forced to choose between the line workers at Cargill and the owners of that massive, private U.s.-based company.)
Putting emotion aside: the COVID-19 outbreak at Cargill was a month ago. At its height, it was the most rampant in North America, affecting about 1,200 people, who either worked at the plant or were close relatives and friends of employees.
So how many died? So far, with a handful still in hospital and the rest recovered, that toll linked to the plant stands at three: victims aged 71, 67 and 51 respectively. By that example — and 1,200 is a big number — the odds of dying from COVID-19, if infected there, are about one in 400: except in one demographic, which we’ll get to in a moment.
Of course, no one knew how vicious this outbreak would prove to be and the ghostly images of a city under lockdown that emerged out of China four months ago worried us all about the threat from this looming, invisible killer.
Thus, it was right to close down Alberta. But should we repeat such actions if and when numbers spike again, now that we have firsthand evidence of COVID-19’S morbidity? Or should we instead concentrate on the area in which this virus has indeed cut a swath: the province’s continuing care homes, where 94 of the 128 deaths have occurred?
Spending, maybe, half a billion dollars over time helping operators improve staffing levels, training, regulations, equipment and testing in those facilities would be money well spent. It would have a lasting impact, not just on any COVID-19 reprise but also on annual flu deaths. Compared with today’s burgeoning economic toll, such an outlay would be chicken feed.
Logic points in that direction, rather than again causing mayhem by shuttering the province at any resurgence. But logic only applies when we can look beyond the tragedy of a single death.
Chris Nelson is a Calgary writer.
COVID-19 hasn’t been as viciously fatal as feared four months ago.