Let the provinces decide own measures
Feds have little credibility on COVID file
If the vaccines are the miracle many predicted wouldn’t happen, the collateral damage from the pandemic — and from our efforts to keep it at bay — seems to be the opposite. There is little evidence it’s any less terrible than we feared.
between March and November last year, british Columbia reported 1,394 deaths from illicit drug toxicity — 89 per cent more than in the same period a year earlier. At the end of November, the net rise in opioid deaths in b.c. exceeded the COVID-19 death toll by 50 per cent.
Nationwide, the Public Health Agency of Canada reported last month, opioid deaths soared 58 per cent between April and June from the previous quarter; and Public Health Ontario reported a 38 per cent increase in opioid deaths during the first 15 weeks of the pandemic compared to the previous 15 weeks. In several of Ontario’s public health units, as in b.c., the net increase in the opioid death toll exceeded the number of deaths associated with COVID-19.
We can’t quantify the developmental effects on children yet, but if public education was any good to begin with, then an entire cohort of kids is surely getting screwed. disparities within the public systems, never mind between public and private, were always glaring; judging by the many deeply unsatisfied reviews of distance learning options on offer in the public system, they are being widened dramatically.
In the meantime, we get a glimpse of far more immediate and violent threats to children. The Children’s Hospital of eastern Ontario reports an alarming rise in babies presenting with signs of serious physical abuse, and this did not come as a great shock. London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital diagnosed 10 children with abusive head trauma during the first month of england’s national lockdown. That’s more than it normally sees in a year.
The numbers aren’t huge in absolute terms. What they suggest could be going on behind closed doors, however, might well be.
To a great extent, this was inevitable. With a vaccine on the way, I think it’s reasonable to assume the cures Canadian jurisdictions adopted will be seen in coming years as much less bad than the disease.
but it’s not insane to argue the opposite point, no matter how many crazy, stupid and infuriatingly unserious people do so. This remains a virus that targets almost exclusively the elderly for its very worst effects — 89 per cent of Canada’s dead were over 70, 96 per cent over 60. It is not immoral to weigh the negative effects you’re having on people with 50, 60 or 70 years left to experience them against the risk that people with five or 10 might pass away early.
There’s a reason your health card won’t fund every single drug treatment out there; the government, of necessity, has put a price on your life.
Figuring out that balance should probably involve math, but what you plug into the spreadsheet comes down to philosophy. reasonable people disagree on philosophy. Canadian provinces have taken radically and subtly different approaches to the pandemic, with widely disparate results, but it is not possible to argue that the most draconian lockdown measures are correlated with the best results. West of the Maritimes, the best results are unambiguously in british Columbia and Saskatchewan, where you can actually go out to dinner.
This is what makes it so maddening to see the feds continually poking their noses in and urging provinces never to give an inch.
“Strong measures (must be) kept in place in order to maintain a steady downward trend,” federal public health chief dr. Theresa Tam said in a Saturday news release. That’s a perfectly reasonable statement, but she has to know the media is going to play that for conflict: “Canada’s top doctor warned provinces against easing stringent public health measures Saturday, just as the premier of (Quebec) said he hoped to do exactly that in a little over a week.”
Quebec has an 8 p.m. curfew, for God’s sake, soon may it die. Whatever “easing” François Legault announces Tuesday — throwing the retail sector a bone, reportedly — Quebec will remain one of Canada’s most locked-down jurisdictions and one of the world’s leading COVID-19 mortuaries. And british Columbia will continue to lead the country in least-bad outcomes despite some of the least harsh pandemic measures.
What grounds do Tam and her political bosses have to teach the provinces to suck eggs? Their credibility as lockdown proponents is, or certainly should be, non-existent. That record is of staunchly opposing doing the things the world’s most successful countries have done on very dubious grounds, and then belatedly embracing them.
Goodness knows they have enough on their plates: If they’re serious about locking up returning travellers in hotels, the opportunities to screw it up will be boundless. I would expect at least one massive outbreak within the first week.
It is a feature, not a bug, that Canadian jurisdictions have been free to craft their pandemic responses to their societies’ needs, wants and temperaments — to take their best shot at that deadly-delicate balancing act. It is a bug, not a feature, that Canadians, including so many in charge in Ottawa, can’t see their way to accepting it.
the government … has put a price On your life.