Lots to learn

There’s a learning curve in everything, but let’s hope this is a quick one.

Because there are lives in the balance.

For months now, we have been learning to handle a whole bunch of curveballs. Working from home while juggling children and their education. From managing changing public health requirements, from masks to visiting family members in care, to having whole new sorts of small celebrations of holidays.

There have been clear steps forward — and missteps, too — as people muddled through changes in everyday life, and occasionally through confusing and conflicting recommendations as well.

It was all part of learning about COVID-19 and how to best fight the virus — a learning curve that even extended to medical treatment, as physicians, researchers and scientists attempt to put together the pieces of a brand new type of puzzle in as little time as possible.

Governments have had to learn and change, too — finding ways to help people thrown out of work by lockdowns, for example, or helping businesses pay rent. They had to determine where to put additional health-care dollars — how to handle, at the outset of COVID-19, Canadians returning from a myriad of places, from cruise ships to foreign vacations to overseas work.

But now, apparently, there’s a new learning curve, and it’s a big one.

Even though governments and health officials have known for months that COVID-19 vaccines were coming — and that there were going to be massive logistical challenges in getting as many people vaccinated as possible, and also as quickly as possible — the Christmas season saw one part of the distribution system, in one of Canada’s largest provinces, fall short.

Ontario halted vaccinations for part of the Christmas season, a move that the head of Ontario’s COVID-19 vaccine task force, retired general Rick Hillier, now admits was a mistake. It meant that province had administered, as of Wednesday morning, slightly more than 14,000 of the 90,000 vaccine doses it received in the first shipment from PfizerBioNTech.

Despite the months of lead-times, health officials in several Canadian provinces, along with federal officials, are concerned about the sheer volume of vaccine shots that have to be administered, along with finding the resources in already-strained health systems to get those vaccines into Canadian arms.

Ontario is looking at the possibility of having health-care workers do extra shifts, along with bringing back recently retired staff and others who have left their jobs.

There are always going to be missteps as new efforts are launched, especially one as large as this.

But there have been months and months to prepare, and the actual logistics involved are, for the most part, while massive, not as complicated as they could be.

Perhaps we have to expect a learning curve. We should also expect it to be as short as possible.