It’s even worse than expected
On the day Ontario’s COVID-19 numbers hit yet another all-time high and new modelling shows we’re well on our way to 6,500 cases a day by mid-December, Premier Doug Ford was happily talking about ship building.
He was in Hamilton, touting Ontario as the manufacturing powerhouse of Canada and simply delighted that the “Ontario-made logo” will be on more Heddle Shipyards products.
In normal times, that’s standard fare for the premier. But, in the middle of a surging second wave that’s even worse than we realized, and with questions swirling about whether Ontario’s pandemic approach is putting lives and the entire health-care system at great risk, it smacks of a politician in denial.
It really does look as though the man in charge of leading14.5 million people through this crisis has lost the plot.
It’s reminiscent of the earliest days of the pandemic when Ford told people to travel and have fun on March Break just days before Canadians were urged to get home as fast as possible.
Back then, though, the virus was so new that medical experts were updating their advice practically by the hour so it was possible to forgive the premier for being a little behind. Eight months later, there is absolutely no excuse for it. Ford is trucking along with his openfor-business mantra, trying to sell the business tax breaks in last week’s budget while the medical and scientific community are collectively pulling their hair out that more isn’t being done to deal with the crisis.
It’s worth remembering that when Ontario closed all non-essential businesses on March 23, there were 78 new COVID-19 cases reported that day for a total of 489.
On Thursday, Ontario reported 1,575 new cases. There are now nearly as many people hospitalized with COVID-19 as there were total cases when Ford felt things were so dire that we had to go into a lockdown to regain control.
Yet now he doesn’t want to hear about it. Ford seems determined to be the last one in the room to notice the raging fire that threatens not just to consume lives unnecessarily but a properly functioning health care system and, ultimately, the economic recovery itself.
Ontarians have long known things were moving in the wrong direction, even Ford admits that, but now we know the incredible speed with which it’s happening.
A 3-per-cent growth rate looked like a reasonable scenario just a few days ago as the data tables were being prepared for public release. By Thursday, even 5 per cent, which projects 6,500 cases a day by mid-December, looked “optimistic,” said Adalsteinn Brown, co-chair of the COVID-19 science advisory table and dean of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.
Ontario’s current trajectory is worse than several European jurisdictions already in lockdown. Long-term-care outbreaks and deaths are rising and will continue to do so. And under any scenario intensive care thresholds will be exhausted within two weeks, forcing hospitals to start cancelling surgeries.
It’s incomprehensible that these numbers haven’t jolted some sense into Ford. Yet he’s still going on about his “balanced approach.”
Ford, who prides himself on being a businessman first, is clearly sick of closures and seems to have stopped listening to what much of the medical community and his own data is telling him.
He dismissed a widespread consensus that the provincial framework for COVID-19 restrictions is far too permissive as “one doctor’s perspective.”
It’s many experts, including ones that Health Minister Christine Elliott claimed were integral to creating the provincial framework but, through reporting by the Star’s Kate Allen and Jennifer Yang, we discover either didn’t see the final thresholds or disagree with them entirely.
It’s the head of the Ontario Medical Association, which represents thousands of physicians, it’s academics, researchers and epidemiologists — all are sounding the alarm.
Even Ontario’s Medical Officer of Health, Dr. David Williams, who stands by the premier, admits we’re in a “critical time.”
Ford needs to right Ontario’s “balanced approach,” which has tilted too far to business interests and away from health outcomes, before it’s too late — if it isn’t already.
It looks as though the man in charge of leading 14.5 million people through this crisis has lost the plot