A weak premier played chicken with a ruthless COVID-19 virus
There is no plan. Oh, the hospitals are planning like mad, desperately. Public health is scrambling because the vaccination plan was upended last week without warning, without consultation, but with limitations. A lot of people are trying their best.
But in Ontario there is no plan at the provincial level except to blame others, to download responsibility to others, and to come to a lurching realization that it’s already too late. It’s going to get bad here. And it is beginning to seem as though the government is finally panicked enough to, accidentally or otherwise, try something like the right thing.
Premier Doug Ford is in over his head, and it is the weakness that will linger. This failure has plenty of parents in his government, and the incompetence has been exposed in increasingly ruthless fashion, day by day.
Sunday, the minister of education wrote a letter saying schools would stay open after the April break; Monday, the premier declared they would be closed. It’s a pattern. On April 1 the government announced restrictions, and changed them five days later as the baked-in numbers kept rising. The vaccination plan was described in great detail on Tuesday last week. Wednesday, it was completely different.
On the one hand, it is refreshing to see a government that is willing to change course in the face of events. On the other, the events are happening because this government decided to blow the engines eight and a half weeks ago, despite everything they had been told. And this is panic.
“The government is playing chicken, and I think they’ve actually lost,” says Dr. Andrew Morris, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Toronto, and the medical director of the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program at SinaiUniversity
Health Network. “Who would have thought that a year later we wouldn’t have learned from other jurisdictions? But here we are.”
It’s not like the changes are perfect. Ontario needed restrictions, but it needed them Feb. 11, and even the current versions probably aren’t enough to actually reduce cases.
A redeployment of vaccines by the risk profile of postal codes is a great idea, and necessary, though the CBC’s Mike Crawley exposed that five of the 114 vaccination hot spots were in fact less COVIDheavy than the provincial average, and that four were held by Progressive Conservative MPPs; meanwhile, seven ridings with much higher rates that were not designated as hot spots were all held by opposing parties.
The schools … well, it’s really something when the province insists schools are safe, refuses to properly test, keeps kids home after Christmas, moves March break, calls on the federal government to somehow procure vaccines for children, won’t cancel classes before April break, insists schools will reopen after April break, and then shuts schools the next day. So we get the blunt-force application of closures across the province, because there is simply too much virus in the community. Well, how did that happen?
But at least the lurching is generally in the right direction, and that’s the best you can say about it. It’s because there is no plan. This province didn’t prepare for the second wave — the wave began in August, and money for testing and contact tracing wasn’t announced until Sept. 24. It didn’t prepare for the vaccine rollout, which is both cheerfully accelerating, and is also an everyone-for-themselves shambles.
And this government sprinted into the third wave, heedless and ignorant and uncaring, and now the best we can hope for is that they accidentally make the right move, between bouts of blaming everybody else for a government that ignored the warnings from just about every medical association in the province.
When asked what changed between Lecce’s letter Sunday and this decision Monday, chief medical officer of health David Williams said that with original COVID “we would look at a seven-day rolling average” but with the variants, “we’re not waiting a whole week to see if the overall weekly average changes.”
You can, of course, check a seven-day average any day of the week; you just have to count back seven days.
Sometimes, it’s OK if you feel like weeping.
Save some sorrow, though. The Scarborough patients that were getting sent to Kingston are going to Ottawa now. The models show that ICU admission will likely double the second-wave high, and the real peak will likely be higher. The gruesome calculus of deciding who gets cared for is being arranged.
The other day Dr. Morris was talking to a colleague who had fought heavy highway traffic on the way in to work.
“And I said, can you imagine if there was a massive pileup?” said Morris.
“Just imagine. Our system could not manage it. If you had a 40-car pileup, a 20-car pileup, a Greyhound bus rolls over, and a bunch of people surge into ICUs, we don’t have that ability now.”
For a while, it has been unclear whether the people running this province knew how bad this was going to get, even as so many people tried to tell them. Maybe they do now.