Health workers deserve better
There’ll be time enough, once the pandemic is behind us, to count up the cost and figure out how things could have been handled better. For now, fighting the battle must be the highest priority.
But there’s already one area where the mistakes are so glaringly obvious that we don’t need the benefit of hindsight to point them out: the shameful shortage of medical masks, face shields, gowns and other personal protective equipment (PPE) for front-line health-care workers.
We’re sending far too many doctors, nurses and technicians into the front lines without an adequate supply of the most basic protective gear. This isn’t sophisticated equipment; we’re talking about such things as masks that ordinarily can be churned out for less than a dollar apiece.
Until this week, governments insisted there was no overall shortage. But Quebec Premier François Legault now warns his province may run out of crucial equipment within days. And it was only on Wednesday that federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu admitted the obvious: that Ottawa “likely” didn’t have enough PPE in the national stockpile.
But all along there had been a stream of stories from healthcare workers about rationing in hospitals — about nurses being handed two masks at the beginning of their shift to get them through the day. Or a memo to staff in Hamilton telling them to keep using surgical masks until they’re “grossly soiled or wet.”
We owe health workers who are literally risking their lives and the well-being of their families much better than this. And we owe it to ourselves to do everything we can for them; if they start to fall by the wayside, the health system will be overwhelmed all the quicker and will find it even harder to cope with the coming wave of COVID-19 patients.
Governments at all levels, and on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border, are now scrambling to catch up.
The federal government earmarked another $2 billion this week to buy more PPE in Canada and abroad. And it’s signing contracts with Canadian companies to produce more equipment in this country instead of relying on overstretched global supply chains. But those supplies won’t be ready for weeks, or even months.
The Ontario government, too, plans to spend $50 million through its Ontario Together Fund to procure more masks, gowns, sanitizers, face shields and ventilators. Some companies are retooling to turn out PPEs, and others are donating supplies out of their own stockpiles.
Good for them for responding to the call for urgent help. We should all do what we can. But the hard truth is that we shouldn’t be relying on random donations of potentially lifesaving items, especially not when we’re already deep into the crisis.
We don’t send armies into battle and then scout about for weapons to give them a fighting chance of survival. Nor should we send health-care workers into the fight of their lives (indeed, the fight of our lives) without the tools they need.
This is all the more tragic because the warning signs were there long before the coronavirus raised its ugly head. With the experience of SARS and other global health scares behind them, governments had years to prepare for the inevitable “next time.” Yet they failed.
An audit of Canada’s National Emergency Stockpile System in 2011, for example, found that some of the stored equipment was out of date even then. Likewise, Ontario’s auditor general reported in 2017 that 80 per cent of the province’s stockpile of PPE was out of date, and there was no system for rotating old equipment out and replacing it with fresh gear.
More broadly, virtually every study of pandemic readiness, including those in the U.S. and other countries, identified shortages of PPE as a major issue. It was, as they say, one of the “known unknowns” for anyone knowledgable about this area.
Yet governments everywhere grew complacent. They squeezed health budgets and allowed their emergency stockpiles to moulder away. They were like fire departments that don’t bother to check their hoses for holes until a big blaze is roaring out of control.
There’s another sobering lesson in all this: relying on global supply chains for strategically important equipment on short notice is foolish.
Most of the world’s supply of medical masks, for example, is made in China. And of course that country needed everything it could produce when COVID-19 first struck there, making it very hard for other countries to obtain supply.
Canada relies heavily on a 3M plant in Britain for its supply, and that company likewise met demand in Europe before sending equipment further abroad. It will be weeks, in many cases months, before Canadian suppliers can gear up local production.
In the meantime, Canada is left bidding on the world market for scarce emergency supplies at a time when every other country is doing the same.
There’s plenty of blame to go around. Governments that are now scrambling to make up for lost time inherited the mistakes of their predecessors. Finger-pointing won’t fix anything.
But it’s worth remembering: much of this crisis is out of our control. But ensuring an adequate supply of masks and gowns is something we could have done, with only a bit more money and care.
The hard truth is we shouldn’t be relying on random donations of potentially life-saving items