Why hasn’t every case been counted?

On the weekend, I read the Ontario Ministry of Health’s advice that those who experience manageable COVID-19 symptoms after returning from foreign travel should do nothing more than self-isolate. Don’t call Public Health (or anyone else) to let them know. Don’t get tested for coronavirus or (more realistically) make efforts to figure out how to get tested. Just sit back, relax, and leave health professionals alone to try to get a handle on all this for a smaller group of people, because there’s no way they’re going to be able to get a handle on it for everyone in the province.

And that was when my loosely held assumption that someone reliable was in charge with a coherent plan to guide us through this pandemic — an assumption that had been crumbling for days — finally fell away entirely. What’s the point of flattening a curve that represents numbers provided by health officials who have officially stopped counting?

The success that China and South Korea have had in slowing the spread of COVID-19 (in China’s case, once it had no choice but to acknowledge COVID’s existence, of course) has been attributed to social distancing and aggressive detection. South Korean Vice Minister of Health and Welfare Kim Ganglip told reporters that having an “enormous testing capability,” as that country does, “is the most important means of fending off a contagious disease outbreak.” I’m assuming Ontario’s health ministry knows this and is nonetheless choosing to throw up its hands and say “screw it” when it comes to detecting

COVID-19 in returning Ontarians because the ministry is positive the province can’t get its act together to do that much testing. That’s a bad situation. Though it’s still a slightly better situation than if Ontario’s health ministry just hasn’t fully thought through or understood what harmful effects giving up on detection for so many people will have on the country’s efforts to get COVID-19 under control.

But let’s be optimistic and assume Ontario’s health ministry is merely incapable of doing what it should rather than unaware. Why is it that Ontario doesn’t have the capacity to do all the COVID-19 testing it ought to be doing? Everything

has happened so fast and hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but as with so many other problems, we in Canada watched disastrous consequences unfold in the United States first, where under-testing and bureaucratic barriers to testing allowed the coronavirus to take hold and spread in the community, then we proceeded to make the same mistakes here as if we didn’t know any better.

It’s not that individual doctors and nurses and Public Health workers aren’t earnestly trying to protect us, often at great cost to themselves and their families. They are. Rather, the demoralizing message is as I wrote before: there’s been no dependable leader at the helm steering a clear way forward. We knew that to be the case in the United States; it’s been self-evident for almost four years. But for all my libertarian tendencies, I must admit that I expected better here.

I’m sure being ready to handle COVID-19 would not have been easy for Ontario or Canada. I am also sure that being ready to handle COVID-19 was possible for Ontario and Canada, especially when our response is compared with that of South Korea. Forget the Oscars, the South Koreans deserve an award for best disease preparedness, managing to test almost 10,000 people for the coronavirus back in the first few weeks of February, even before they knew they had a real problem. In the following several weeks, as the outbreak became apparent there, they have been testing about 12,000 people a day. This, the Los Angeles Times reports, has given South Korean health authorities “the ability to spot outbreaks as they emerge, focus resources on those areas and isolate those with the potential to spread the virus.”

“The early detection, isolation and treatment has translated into a low mortality rate of about 0.7 per cent, compared with more than three per cent worldwide,” the Times concludes.

On Monday morning, CBC ran a piece online warning us that we’re going to see COVID-19 cases in Canada rise for at least the next couple of weeks, but we shouldn’t conclude from those numbers that social distancing has failed. That’s true; but given that Ontario has now wilfully lost count of how many of the thousands of recently returned Ontarians are infected with coronavirus, we probably can’t conclude much of anything from the numbers our health officials are providing. Which isn’t the way it had to be. But became inevitable when no strong steward stepped forward with a rational plan to get ahead of the virus.

THE SOUTH KOREANS DESERVE AN AWARD FOR BEST DISEASE

PREPAREDNESS.