Science and health bested by panic and populism
Our provincial government has apparently learned nothing from the two previous waves
In times of crisis, the actions of the public and officials are guided by two things we need to know: What is happening now, how bad is it? Then, what must we do to contain or minimize a worsening situation?
In the case of our current COVID-19 crisis these facts have come in two distinct but related sets of numbers. There are the hard daily numbers; the cases, the hospitalizations, the ICU loading and sadly, the deaths. Then there is the statistical modelling by which epidemiological, mathematical and statistical analysts apply those daily numbers to our provincial medical capacities to provide the best predictions of what might happen next so as to guide our leaders in their efforts at containment and prevention.
Because of their immediate impact on our families and our daily lives, the public tend to concentrate on the hard daily numbers and because that is where the news is, so too do the media. But the daily numbers only provide a snapshot of the pandemic at that moment in time; they are out of date almost as soon as they are published. In an accelerating world of variant driven, rapidly increasing case counts, they can only tell us where the pandemic has been.
The mathematical models, being predictive in nature, therefore less precise, are the only method by which we can make any projection of where the pandemic might go next and what toll it might exact when it gets there. The sole purpose of that statistical modelling is to point out what next steps we should be planning in order to protect hospitals and prevent ICUs from overloading and failure.
So far, the biggest failure in this pandemic has been the failure of our provincial government to either understand the models and plan responses in a timely fashion or, worse still, choosing to ignore them for expediency, political ideology or opportunistic photo-ops.
In Ontario, the modelling numbers and the trends have been there for all to see. We did not need to be epidemiologists or statisticians. We saw the modelling laid out before us. We only needed to read the newspapers or watch TV to see the approaching tsunami. The Ontario government saw the same models and projections, yet did nothing.
The fact that they knew and chose not to act became evident last week. In response to questions about the delay in locking down and applying new public-health measures, when all the scientific modelling predicted that case numbers and hospitalizations were about to explode, Ontario Solicitor-General Sylvia Jones replied: “We wanted to make sure the modelling was actually showing up in our hospitals.”
So we watched as the Ford government chose only to react to the headline grabbing daily numbers instead of planning their response to the modelling projections, then waited to assure themselves that one would in fact catch up to the other, which, predictably, it did. This was not a failure of science, not a failure of knowledge. This was a failure to act; a singular failure of leadership.
Throughout this crisis, the Ontario government has bought into the false health-versus-economy dichotomy and worse yet, after reluctantly and belatedly tightening public-health measures to combat the second wave, they reopened again too quickly and broadly, for all of two weeks, only to retreat rapidly this week. In their repeatedly desperate attempts to lock down while staying open for business, the Ford government has continually vacillated, hesitated and utterly failed to follow the medical science and the COVID-19 infection modelling.
Ontario now faces overloaded health and critical-care capacities, problems that cannot be solved by simply repurposing hospitals or adding ICU beds. Each requires highly skilled teams of nurses, physicians and more. Fifteen months into this pandemic, finding a reserve of such skilled teams will be a massive challenge, resulting in increased illness and deaths among every age cohort and, ironically, extending the economic fallout which, at times, seemed all they cared about.
Failure is not the best teaching method, but I think we were hopeful that governments at all levels, coping with something brutally new and unknown would at least learn from past missteps. But after 15 months of being outflanked by COVID-19 and with a third wave of this pandemic picking up steam by the day, our Ontario government has apparently learned nothing from the two previous waves.