National Post (National Edition)
SITUATION: CRITICAL
Getting the vaccine rollout right was Ottawa's Job One, but delays are imperiling our return to normal — and putting us farther behind other leading nations.
Afrightfully contagious form of the COVID-19 virus some say could become a “pandemic within a pandemic” is upping the urgency to speed Canada's maddeningly slow vaccine rollout. Is there a better way to do this? Focus now on the under30s, the likeliest spreaders who are driving the winter wave? Move people who have already had COVID-19 to the back of the line, assuming they have some lingering immunity? Concentrate on vulnerable communities, including Black and other racialized populations? Ditch dosing deadlines for giving the second shot?
“One of the tough balancing challenges in this vaccine rollout is how much fine-graining to do,” Dr. David Naylor, co-chair of Canada's national COVID-19 immunity task force, said in an email to the National Post.
“We can tie ourselves up in knots trying to develop and implement a precisely and perfectly fair queue for vaccines, and time is very much of the essence right now.”
While Canada is staring down a SARS-CoV-2 variant first identified in England believed up to 74 per cent more transmissible than the current dominant strain, and another variant from South Africa, it's not just a race between vaccines and mutations. Large parts of the country were in a mess before the variants emerged. Health-care workers are exhausted. Intensive-care doctors in Quebec and Ontario are dusting off triage protocols and conducting dry runs of who should get routed to the ICU and who should be left behind in preparation for a possible total saturation of ICU resources.
Federal modelling released Friday is predicting 10,000 cases daily by the end of January. Deaths may soon surpass those in the first peak. Provinces will face a scarcity of vaccine until millions more doses start arriving in April, while Alberta and Ontario are already running low of the approved Pfizer and Moderna shots.
Israel, by comparison, has vaccinated more than two-million people, at a rate of 25 doses per 100 people, according to Bloomberg data. The total number of shots given in Canada so far? A mere 458,000, or a rate of 1.22 per 100 people.
Are there ways of getting Canadians out of the pandemic misery any sooner?