A year of COVID cluelessness
Finally some good news on the pandemic. “The risk of an outbreak in Canada remains low” and if one should somehow occur, “the province is prepared to actively identify, prevent and control the spread of this serious infectious disease in Ontario.” What a relief after a year of … Hey, wait a minute. Those statements were a year ago.
The first is from Canada’s chief public health officer and the second from the Ontario minister of health, so they carry the solemn weight of informed expertise. But also, alas, the burden of mind-boggling fatuity. So why are they still talking nonsense in the same self-satisfied way?
you may say it’s easy to be wise in retrospect. But I warned 20 years ago that you can’t contain diseases in the modern world (specifically on July 19, 2000, Feb. 14, 2001, and March 12, 2001) and so centralized hospitals are structurally dangerous (May 7, 2003).
When a novel coronavirus erupts in the most populated nation on our very connected planet, anyone with half a brain knows the risk of an outbreak in Canada is not low. Or high. It’s 1. On a scale of 0 to 1. As in it will happen. If you heard tomorrow of a new flu strain in China, how would you rank the probability of it turning up here? Or a year ago? So why didn’t they?
Worse, why do those in power continue to emit that soporific bwa-bwa-bwa like Charlie Brown’s teachers, regardless of how wrong they’ve been in the past or what they’re prating about now? From the vetting process for governors general to runaway deficits to masks not working and closing borders being racist.
Next time dr. Theresa Tam or Christine elliott explains as if to a dim and insolent child the transcendent wisdom of the latest lockdown, release from lockdown, decision to delay the second vaccination dose or anything else, they’ll exude the same air of expertise sufficiently ponderous to smother all dissent. even though every prediction they’ve made about this being a turning point, that being about to happen and the other being all but impossible has been wrong, nothing can dent their self-confidence.
If I could, I’d ask who told Minister elliott a year ago Ontario had this one in the bag? did she scrutinize reports from medical experts on flaws in the SARS response and measures taken since to prepare and say OK, we’re ready, good on you for destroying all those masks? Or just welcome Pr staff from the premier’s office bearing the sheet music to “We are the best” scored for trombone and pomposity?
As for dr. Tam, she is a medical expert. By what contorted logic or understanding of medical history (including the inexorable spread of the Black death half a millennium before the first contrail spawned the first contrail conspiracy theory) did she think COVID couldn’t get here from China if we said “No thanks” while continuing to land planeloads of travellers from, uh, China? did anyone tell her we couldn’t contain the Hong Kong Flu in 1968? Why would anyone have to, given her job and training?
It’s not just them, of course. If you revisit past budgets, federal or provincial, which only an insomniac masochist would, you’ll find the same combination of solemn fatuity backed by shadowy expertise generating predictions less useful than a Ouija board. It’s how the public sector operates and it’s all fun and games until something important happens and it becomes a real danger to life and limb.
I wrote this spring that preventing a second wave was rubbish. All the lockdowns could do was delay it until we could no longer stand to stagnate in our bunkers like Ted in 60 Seconds, delivering all the damage we’ve suffered to the economy, public finances, and our mental health and cardio for nothing.
They didn’t even condescend to scoff. And now the latest magic spell is wait for the vaccines. Which they couldn’t even order properly, and apparently nobody told them about evolution or that a mutant COVID strain would get here from Britain or South Africa not in months or years but days.
Nor apparently did anyone tell them about trade-offs. As david redman just said in C2C Journal, the sensible approach would be to limit the impact of COVID on our well-being, not the case count. But the main public sector concern is the impact of the pandemic on the public health system, not the public, one more piece of dangerously smug idiocy.
All this stuff would be bad enough if delivered in a shrill cackle by someone wearing a fright wig. Instead it’s presented in the same solemn tone as a Latin mass, by people whose complacent cluelessness has been horribly on display for a year to everyone but, apparently, themselves.
Bwa bwa bwa.
all fun and games until something important happens.