A few days ago, the Canadian province of British Columbia- which includes the City of Vancouver- announced a sweeping edict of business "reopenings" that would, essentially, get about 60-70% of their economy moving again. Although BC isn't the first Canadian province to reopen to such a degree, it is the most prominent, as their move allows one of Canada's economic engines to start up again.
BC was spurred to this move when their total number of COVID-19 cases dipped into the low double digits, with the province recording only 23 new cases on May 6, 2020. While the moves are optimistic for sure, the BC edicts include a lot of "tough talk" from the government to its people, telling them that "they have the responsibility to make sure the disease doesn't come back". BC also insisted that large gatherings- like Vancouver Canucks games- and nightclubs won't reopen without a vaccine, a therapeutic or herd immunity, since they believe that "contract tracing in those environments would be impossible".
It's par for the course for a lot of jurisdictions who have also decided to "open up", and, I'll grant that, while still knee-deep in the crisis, it's probably better to be cautious about the future than overestimate your optimism, even if, logically, there's every reason to believe in that optimism.
It's highly likely that by July or August this disease will be almost completely gone in North America and we'll never have to deal with it again, but that's not a call I'd make with 100% as of this writing. It'd be foolish to base policy behind it.
However, what is also foolish to base policy behind is counting on the public buy-in to disease countermeasures as well as independent scientists who- quite rightly- don't want the pressure to end the pandemic quickly. At some point, as a policymaker, you have to figure out ways to solve the issue on your own, because relying on others isn't well, reliable.
Yet nowhere in any of that strong talk from the BC health officials was any indication that they intended to acquire more hospital equipment and resources, like hospital beds, ventilators, doctors and nurses. Perhaps it's part of an announcement that I missed, but you'd think that, in the middle of a health emergency, the stockpile of your healthcare system would be one of the things health officials would want to talk about most since without resources there can be no hope of fighting a disease.
This is, ultimately, what really bothers me about governments and their responses to COVID-19. They've pretty much put the entire burden on stopping the disease on us and done very little on their end (except talk), with many times government inaction being what exacerbated the pandemic in the first place.
What's even more frustrating is that, no matter how you really look at this disease, it's not something that isn't manageable at all if we're smart about it. Back in March governments released rather grim projections that they used to justify placing their people in some form a lockdown, projections that have proven in May to be wildly off the mark- even in their so-called "best case scenarios".
That should mean that if a second wave of COVID-19 infections were to arrive- and that's a big if- we should be able to handle it without a lockdown, either with our current stockpile or with top-ups that should be well within our governments' budgets and production capabilities.
Especially if we start topping up now, with our current wave on the wane.
Look, policymakers have to get realistic at some point. While I am optimistic that scientists will sort out a medical solution to COVID-19 sooner rather than later, it's unfair for governments to place them on a timeline when science doesn't work well like that.
Furthermore, human nature means we're all going to go back to our habits, because "COVID-19 fatigue" will set in and I doubt many of us will want to physically distance forever. We'll also all want to work and play again, like we used to, because the lockdowns were supposed to be temporary.
Besides, there's only so long you can sell a public on fear. Eventually, we regain our senses, and if our senses tell us that our governments are placing an unfair burden on us, there will only be so much of it that we can take before we fight back. Public governance, after all, is a two-way street.
Governments have asked us to make immeasurable sacrifices during this crisis and we have- as a world- more than risen to that challenge. If they want to see this crisis through, it's time governments rise up to the challenge themselves.
-Daniel Arnold
A social and culture blog who covers everything from sports, to entertainment, to society and to life in general. You may not always agree with what I have to say but I will make you think.
Thursday, May 07, 2020
Wednesday, May 06, 2020
Why the worst-case COVID-19 scenario really isn't that bad
OK. Let's imagine the post-lockdown world for a moment.
It's November 17, 2024. 12:27AM, to be exact. It had been a typical fall to that point, with the weather only now turning from the nippy, crisp autumn air to the searing, blistering cold that will define the winter.
However, none of that is really on your mind right now. You just got a new job so you're out with your buddies for a night on the town, with the downtown core more packed than it usually is. Everyone is out drinking and in close quarters, but no one is bothered- in fact, everyone is hugging and high-fiving and kissing everyone else (even random strangers) at rates that, five years ago, no one could have ever imagined.
Not a soul has their cell phone out, unless it's to take down the phone number of a new acquaintance. While social media isn't entirely a thing of the past, our usage has gone down considerably, as the public found they had a newfound appreciation for actual face-to-face, physical contact- and grew tired of the depressing negativity that is often found on social media message boards. Entertainment has a second boom period as a result of all this, but so too do retail and restaurants, as people have come to realize they prefer talking to a real live salesperson before buying something they need as opposed to ordering it online.
Speaking of ordering online, Amazon as a business is no more, ordered broken up by the Federal Trade Commission for their monopolistic practices. Jeff Bezos loses his fortune, but he's not left penniless, retiring to a villa complaining the FTC was really out just to steal his money.
In politics, conservatism and nationalism grow across the globe, as the 2020 crisis made people question globalization even more but, more importantly, it also made people want to limit or even eliminate their country's ability to impose the harsh lockdowns again. U.S. President Donald Trump easily wins another term paving the way for his Vice-President, Mike Pence, to replace him in 2024 (as Trump endorses him right away). The Chinese move further and further towards democracy as anger builds over their country's mishandling of the 2020 crisis and the hit the country took internationally, as fewer countries are willing to do business with them.
Only in Canada is a conservative revolution staved off, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party of Canada regain their majority government after giving their citizens a guaranteed basic income of $3,000 a month, meaning no Canadian ever worries about a lockdown ever again.
Wrestling comes back in front of fans, and the promotions finally decide to play fair, with Wrestlemania becoming a multi-company affair where the best wrestlers truly perform. This after Vince McMahon "mysteriously disappears" during a World Wrestling Entertainment taping during the 2020 lockdown. Even though McMahon is never seen again, the WWE insists all along "it's just a work and he's really fine".
As for sports, they all come back, but not like you've ever seen before. Gone are the long, winding marathon-like seasons of before, replaced with several "mini-tournaments" which offer prizes of their own and qualification for the "big championship" at the end. The sports leagues decide to operate this way after realizing their truncated mini-tournaments to end their 2019-20 seasons was more lucrative for them than their previous model, so they decided to move to it permanently.
Oh, and the Buffalo Sabres and Buffalo Bills become dominant teams in their sports, which pleases the City of Buffalo and some weird guy in Toronto. Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers do win one Super Bowl, though, the Minnesota Twins dominate baseball and the Los Angeles Clippers dominate basketball, while Inter Milan and Manchester United alternate winning soccer's top club prize.
So, there you go...that's the world on November 17, 2024 at 27 minutes after midnight.
OK...you caught me...some of that stuff I did dream up and/or pull out of my derriere. I may have overestimated how well my favourite sports will do...but hey, it's my fantasy.
I might have also let my imagination run wild on the politics front...although I'm fairly certain Mr. Trudeau is going to come out with that UBI. The Liberals have always been sneaky that way.
...but, as far as the general premise goes, that the world of 2024 won't be unrecognizable to the world of 2019?
That you can take right to the bank. You can say that about 2023, 2022, 2021 or even the latter half of 2020.
I'm certain of that.
...and you may have noticed that- until now- I didn't even mention "COVID-19" at all in this article.
That's because "a return to normal" isn't contingent on the existence of COVID-19 or not. It might not even matter how well we deal with it, either.
You might be surprised to read that. Just about every treatise you read- from your Facebook friend Joe who got his epidemiology degree from a cereal box to the person your favourite news site is calling an epidemiologist this week- has said that "we can't return to normal until we eliminate COVID-19". The dire predictions involve a world where everyone wears a mask, everyone stays away from each other and there's nothing fun we can do, among many other "new normal" guidelines that will stay in place until COVID-19 is eliminated.
Now, there are definitely things the COVID-19 crisis showed us about our society that we need to address, like our penchant for crowds and businesses' apathy for cleaning, because we didn't like it before and we won't like them in the future. I also don't think we can expect things to go completely "back to normal" as we understood things until at least the fall of 2021, as the disruptions that COVID-19 caused to the sports and entertainment worlds mean that their seasonal content for 2020-21 will have to be adjusted.
I mean, if the NHL awards the 2020 Stanley Cup in September they're probably not going to start the 2020-21 season in October like they planned. It'll be a November or December start, at least, with an abbreviated season.
...but as far as COVID-19 implementing some of the more drastic and dramatic changes to our day-to-day life that some people are predicting, I can't imagine any of that happening, even if the disease manages (in a worst-case scenario) to stick around.
First, many of these dire predictions still involve people contemplating a disease that was once a mystery to us. It involved a disease that spread quickly but what was one that we knew little about, including, crucially, how we should handle it. One of the lines of thought behind implementing the lockdowns was that we needed to slow this spread of this mystery disease so we can "buy enough time" to know it a bit better so that we can adequately deal with it.
Half a year (or thereabouts) in the COVID-19 pandemic and, while we don't have a complete picture about the virus, we do know a lot more about it now than where we were in mid-March.
Besides, as more research pours in about the virus, the better we're going to understand how to deal with it. There are lots of diseases for which we don't have cures, but it's rare to have a disease that we don't know how to contend with it. For those diseases, their infections are rare and thus don't give us a lot of patients to study, unlike COVID-19, which has literally given us millions.
Secondly, it would be foolish for policymakers to think that the buy-in to "social distancing" will continue forever. People are already flouting it now when the disease is still relatively new and the shock is fresh in the public's mind- the further we get from March 2020 and the shock dissipates the more the very human instinct to "get back to normal" will kick back in.
More to the point, policymakers have done just about everything they can to convince people not to smoke, and they've been doing it for over half a century. Though smoking in Canada is actually going down- 15% prevalence in 2017 vs. 25% in 1999, according to the University of Waterloo- it's still a widespread practice.
Plus the dangers of smoking are very "real" to the public- things like terminal lung cancer, trouble breathing, heart problems and stroke, they resonate with people and those effects are consistent no matter who picks up smoking- some just might get the afflictions later than others do.
COVID-19? Even at its most mysterious, the public still knew that 80% of all cases were mild, meaning for most people, the chances of them getting really sick was very low. The odds have improved since then (especially considering there are increasing reports suggesting our confirmed case total is far lower than the actually infected total) and the odds will always be there, no matter how many sensationalist stories the media prints.
Eventually there's going to be this realization that the risks involved with COVID-19 aren't as dramatic as we thought they were and while the outliers may give some pause, as we get to know COVID-19 more, we'll understand the outliers even more- and lower the disease's danger more.
Lastly, despite what every forecaster had predicted in March about the scope of the pandemic, we've proven that we can handle the disease without bringing our healthcare system into collapse. Of course, the argument is going to be made that without a lockdown our healthcare system would have collapsed, but that's another debate.
What's more telling is that, in this initial wave where this unknown disease hit us and we don't know bad things were going to get and all we had to rely on was forecasts...around the world, the story is consistently the same. Even what forecasters had called the "best case scenarios" turned out to be far worse than the COVID-19 situation that we actually got.
This can only mean that, in the future, if there is a second wave of COVID-19, we at least now have a better idea of how it's going to hit us. Obviously, it's still not a "perfect" science, but at the very least we now have experience and actual data sets that tell us how this disease behaved before, so we can better act- and prepare- accordingly.
Besides, while in March we could talk about administrators being blindsided by COVID-19, now there is no such excuse. Administrators should be doing everything they can to stockpile and ensure they can deal with the surge of COVID-19 cases should it happen, especially considering that our current experience tells us that any future surge isn't out of our ability to handle it, if we plan for it properly.
At the end of the day, even if COVID-19 sticks around, it's not the kind of disease that isn't something that we can't handle, if we're smart about it. A lot of its danger was due to its mystery, now that the mystery surrounding it is almost gone, this should become a disease that should be much easier to handle and live with. We as a society have managed to find ways to mitigate the impact of many other diseases that are worse than COVID-19 without having to disrupt our daily lives too much, so there is no reason we cannot find a way to mitigate COVID-19 and regain our sense of normalcy.
Obviously, elimination- and a vaccine- would be the real endgame, and that endgame gets more realistic with each passing day. However, even if it wasn't, it's still not a reason for COVID-19 to be the end of our world.
-Daniel Arnold
It's November 17, 2024. 12:27AM, to be exact. It had been a typical fall to that point, with the weather only now turning from the nippy, crisp autumn air to the searing, blistering cold that will define the winter.
However, none of that is really on your mind right now. You just got a new job so you're out with your buddies for a night on the town, with the downtown core more packed than it usually is. Everyone is out drinking and in close quarters, but no one is bothered- in fact, everyone is hugging and high-fiving and kissing everyone else (even random strangers) at rates that, five years ago, no one could have ever imagined.
Not a soul has their cell phone out, unless it's to take down the phone number of a new acquaintance. While social media isn't entirely a thing of the past, our usage has gone down considerably, as the public found they had a newfound appreciation for actual face-to-face, physical contact- and grew tired of the depressing negativity that is often found on social media message boards. Entertainment has a second boom period as a result of all this, but so too do retail and restaurants, as people have come to realize they prefer talking to a real live salesperson before buying something they need as opposed to ordering it online.
Speaking of ordering online, Amazon as a business is no more, ordered broken up by the Federal Trade Commission for their monopolistic practices. Jeff Bezos loses his fortune, but he's not left penniless, retiring to a villa complaining the FTC was really out just to steal his money.
In politics, conservatism and nationalism grow across the globe, as the 2020 crisis made people question globalization even more but, more importantly, it also made people want to limit or even eliminate their country's ability to impose the harsh lockdowns again. U.S. President Donald Trump easily wins another term paving the way for his Vice-President, Mike Pence, to replace him in 2024 (as Trump endorses him right away). The Chinese move further and further towards democracy as anger builds over their country's mishandling of the 2020 crisis and the hit the country took internationally, as fewer countries are willing to do business with them.
Only in Canada is a conservative revolution staved off, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party of Canada regain their majority government after giving their citizens a guaranteed basic income of $3,000 a month, meaning no Canadian ever worries about a lockdown ever again.
Wrestling comes back in front of fans, and the promotions finally decide to play fair, with Wrestlemania becoming a multi-company affair where the best wrestlers truly perform. This after Vince McMahon "mysteriously disappears" during a World Wrestling Entertainment taping during the 2020 lockdown. Even though McMahon is never seen again, the WWE insists all along "it's just a work and he's really fine".
As for sports, they all come back, but not like you've ever seen before. Gone are the long, winding marathon-like seasons of before, replaced with several "mini-tournaments" which offer prizes of their own and qualification for the "big championship" at the end. The sports leagues decide to operate this way after realizing their truncated mini-tournaments to end their 2019-20 seasons was more lucrative for them than their previous model, so they decided to move to it permanently.
Oh, and the Buffalo Sabres and Buffalo Bills become dominant teams in their sports, which pleases the City of Buffalo and some weird guy in Toronto. Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers do win one Super Bowl, though, the Minnesota Twins dominate baseball and the Los Angeles Clippers dominate basketball, while Inter Milan and Manchester United alternate winning soccer's top club prize.
So, there you go...that's the world on November 17, 2024 at 27 minutes after midnight.
OK...you caught me...some of that stuff I did dream up and/or pull out of my derriere. I may have overestimated how well my favourite sports will do...but hey, it's my fantasy.
I might have also let my imagination run wild on the politics front...although I'm fairly certain Mr. Trudeau is going to come out with that UBI. The Liberals have always been sneaky that way.
...but, as far as the general premise goes, that the world of 2024 won't be unrecognizable to the world of 2019?
That you can take right to the bank. You can say that about 2023, 2022, 2021 or even the latter half of 2020.
I'm certain of that.
...and you may have noticed that- until now- I didn't even mention "COVID-19" at all in this article.
That's because "a return to normal" isn't contingent on the existence of COVID-19 or not. It might not even matter how well we deal with it, either.
You might be surprised to read that. Just about every treatise you read- from your Facebook friend Joe who got his epidemiology degree from a cereal box to the person your favourite news site is calling an epidemiologist this week- has said that "we can't return to normal until we eliminate COVID-19". The dire predictions involve a world where everyone wears a mask, everyone stays away from each other and there's nothing fun we can do, among many other "new normal" guidelines that will stay in place until COVID-19 is eliminated.
Now, there are definitely things the COVID-19 crisis showed us about our society that we need to address, like our penchant for crowds and businesses' apathy for cleaning, because we didn't like it before and we won't like them in the future. I also don't think we can expect things to go completely "back to normal" as we understood things until at least the fall of 2021, as the disruptions that COVID-19 caused to the sports and entertainment worlds mean that their seasonal content for 2020-21 will have to be adjusted.
I mean, if the NHL awards the 2020 Stanley Cup in September they're probably not going to start the 2020-21 season in October like they planned. It'll be a November or December start, at least, with an abbreviated season.
...but as far as COVID-19 implementing some of the more drastic and dramatic changes to our day-to-day life that some people are predicting, I can't imagine any of that happening, even if the disease manages (in a worst-case scenario) to stick around.
First, many of these dire predictions still involve people contemplating a disease that was once a mystery to us. It involved a disease that spread quickly but what was one that we knew little about, including, crucially, how we should handle it. One of the lines of thought behind implementing the lockdowns was that we needed to slow this spread of this mystery disease so we can "buy enough time" to know it a bit better so that we can adequately deal with it.
Half a year (or thereabouts) in the COVID-19 pandemic and, while we don't have a complete picture about the virus, we do know a lot more about it now than where we were in mid-March.
Besides, as more research pours in about the virus, the better we're going to understand how to deal with it. There are lots of diseases for which we don't have cures, but it's rare to have a disease that we don't know how to contend with it. For those diseases, their infections are rare and thus don't give us a lot of patients to study, unlike COVID-19, which has literally given us millions.
Secondly, it would be foolish for policymakers to think that the buy-in to "social distancing" will continue forever. People are already flouting it now when the disease is still relatively new and the shock is fresh in the public's mind- the further we get from March 2020 and the shock dissipates the more the very human instinct to "get back to normal" will kick back in.
More to the point, policymakers have done just about everything they can to convince people not to smoke, and they've been doing it for over half a century. Though smoking in Canada is actually going down- 15% prevalence in 2017 vs. 25% in 1999, according to the University of Waterloo- it's still a widespread practice.
Plus the dangers of smoking are very "real" to the public- things like terminal lung cancer, trouble breathing, heart problems and stroke, they resonate with people and those effects are consistent no matter who picks up smoking- some just might get the afflictions later than others do.
COVID-19? Even at its most mysterious, the public still knew that 80% of all cases were mild, meaning for most people, the chances of them getting really sick was very low. The odds have improved since then (especially considering there are increasing reports suggesting our confirmed case total is far lower than the actually infected total) and the odds will always be there, no matter how many sensationalist stories the media prints.
Eventually there's going to be this realization that the risks involved with COVID-19 aren't as dramatic as we thought they were and while the outliers may give some pause, as we get to know COVID-19 more, we'll understand the outliers even more- and lower the disease's danger more.
Lastly, despite what every forecaster had predicted in March about the scope of the pandemic, we've proven that we can handle the disease without bringing our healthcare system into collapse. Of course, the argument is going to be made that without a lockdown our healthcare system would have collapsed, but that's another debate.
What's more telling is that, in this initial wave where this unknown disease hit us and we don't know bad things were going to get and all we had to rely on was forecasts...around the world, the story is consistently the same. Even what forecasters had called the "best case scenarios" turned out to be far worse than the COVID-19 situation that we actually got.
This can only mean that, in the future, if there is a second wave of COVID-19, we at least now have a better idea of how it's going to hit us. Obviously, it's still not a "perfect" science, but at the very least we now have experience and actual data sets that tell us how this disease behaved before, so we can better act- and prepare- accordingly.
Besides, while in March we could talk about administrators being blindsided by COVID-19, now there is no such excuse. Administrators should be doing everything they can to stockpile and ensure they can deal with the surge of COVID-19 cases should it happen, especially considering that our current experience tells us that any future surge isn't out of our ability to handle it, if we plan for it properly.
At the end of the day, even if COVID-19 sticks around, it's not the kind of disease that isn't something that we can't handle, if we're smart about it. A lot of its danger was due to its mystery, now that the mystery surrounding it is almost gone, this should become a disease that should be much easier to handle and live with. We as a society have managed to find ways to mitigate the impact of many other diseases that are worse than COVID-19 without having to disrupt our daily lives too much, so there is no reason we cannot find a way to mitigate COVID-19 and regain our sense of normalcy.
Obviously, elimination- and a vaccine- would be the real endgame, and that endgame gets more realistic with each passing day. However, even if it wasn't, it's still not a reason for COVID-19 to be the end of our world.
-Daniel Arnold
Friday, May 01, 2020
Is it too early to reopen our businesses?
Short answer: they never should have been closed in the first place, because that decision was based entirely on panic and not an objective analysis of the situation at hand...
...but, we're long past that point. We've now committed to "locking down" society even though these lockdowns have been nothing but a joke at best and I don't know how effective they really are.
Anyway, for better or for worse, we have a strategy...or at least I thought we had a strategy.
On March 17, 2020, the Canadian Province of Ontario imposed its version of the lockdown, on a day when Ontario gained 12 new cases of COVID-19 to bring its cumulative total to 189. The previous two days had seen case counts grow by 31 and 41, and the day after the lockdowns started, the case count grew by 25. In the days ahead, case totals would grow by a magnitude of a hundred and then eventually by the hundreds, leading up to today where 521 new cases were added giving Ontario a cumulative total, as of May 1, 2020, of 16,608 confirmed COVID-19 cases.
So, in the course of about six weeks, Ontario's COVID-19 totals have increased practically tenfold, and the daily number of new cases has also increased by a factor of 43, and there doesn't seem to be any signs of these trends abating.
Now, we can finagle about the numbers, raise questions about testing, bring up the death total (which, at 1,121, is just as grim), complain about prevalence and where it's "truly" spreading...but the fact of the matter is, the confirmed COVID-19 case number is the one number the public most easily understands and most readily available, with the confirmed case number being the standard bearer for discussing the severity and impact of the disease worldwide.
Having said that...it would stand to reason that if Ontario ordered a lockdown when they only had 189 cases and a new case count of 30 or 40 per day, you'd think that there'd be no discussions- at all- about ending the lockdowns when we're still getting 521 new cases a day and our case total stands at 16,608. If the situation then merited a need for drastic measures, why would the situation right now be any different?
Yet there is Ontario Premier Doug Ford, announcing today that on May 4, certain businesses can reopen. They're most just small scale businesses that don't deal with a lot of people- home and garden centres with curbside pickup, auto dealerships by appointment only, marinas but only to prep for boating season and golf courses, but only for maintenance.
It's a very, very, very, very, very, very small relaxing of restrictions...but it's a relaxing of restrictions nonetheless, and Ford has promised to do more in the coming weeks.
Now, I will grant that- like many other jurisdictions around the world who are also beginning to open things back up- Ford is likely receiving growing pressure from businesses to relax restrictions and allow them to reopen.
I'll also concede that Ford has been more measured in his approach than that of other places, like everyone's favourite punching bag, the State of Florida, who began reopening their beaches on April 19, or the Province of Quebec, which plans to reopen just about everything in a matter of days (even bars) despite being much harder hit by COVID-19 than Ontario was.
Still, a reopening is a reopening and...you know that saying about floodgates. Once you open them, even a little, you can't stop the flood.
Before long, Ford's list of allowed reopenings will include just about everything, because everyone else will want in on the action too. Especially the hospitality industry and the entertainment industry, who need the summer tourist season as their moneymakers.
You may be wondering why I sound opposed to Ford's idea and that of so many other places reopening when I said I didn't support their closure in the first place. Aren't I getting what I want?
The problem is that I just don't see any real government strategy when it comes to dealing with COVID-19- it's just based on reactions and panic. Just how people panicking over whether they were going to get distressingly sick back in March forced the lockdowns, businesses panicking over their rent is what is driving governments to reopen in May.
...and, quite frankly, that shouldn't be happening. If certain conditions caused the government to respond in a certain way, then it stands to reason that the government should continue its response until it can demonstrate that its response needs to change.
In other words, if all it takes is Ontario to have 189 cases of COVID-19 and 30-40 new cases a day to impose a lockdown so "the healthcare system is not overwhelmed", then it should stand to reason that, until we get back to only having 30-40 new cases a day and 189 active cases (or thereabouts) then there shouldn't be any discussion about ending the lockdown.
Unless Ontario says that now they can handle this caseload, which raises questions about why they put in the lockdowns in the first place.
Ultimately this all goes back to the lack of transparency and foresight that has blighted the COVID-19 crisis. Not just have years of healthcare cuts hampered our ability to deal with the crisis now, the inability of the government to put in meaningful measures to mitigate a situation they created means they don't have any hope to get the public to all buy in to their strategy.
Because if governments really did care about public health, they'd develop a strategy and stick to it, and do everything they can to make sure that strategy is successful. No one should have to worry about making their rent or their bills in a time of crisis and it's utterly ridiculous that governments have failed to take that into account.
Because if the government isn't going to take this seriously, then why should I?
-Daniel Arnold
...but, we're long past that point. We've now committed to "locking down" society even though these lockdowns have been nothing but a joke at best and I don't know how effective they really are.
Anyway, for better or for worse, we have a strategy...or at least I thought we had a strategy.
On March 17, 2020, the Canadian Province of Ontario imposed its version of the lockdown, on a day when Ontario gained 12 new cases of COVID-19 to bring its cumulative total to 189. The previous two days had seen case counts grow by 31 and 41, and the day after the lockdowns started, the case count grew by 25. In the days ahead, case totals would grow by a magnitude of a hundred and then eventually by the hundreds, leading up to today where 521 new cases were added giving Ontario a cumulative total, as of May 1, 2020, of 16,608 confirmed COVID-19 cases.
So, in the course of about six weeks, Ontario's COVID-19 totals have increased practically tenfold, and the daily number of new cases has also increased by a factor of 43, and there doesn't seem to be any signs of these trends abating.
Now, we can finagle about the numbers, raise questions about testing, bring up the death total (which, at 1,121, is just as grim), complain about prevalence and where it's "truly" spreading...but the fact of the matter is, the confirmed COVID-19 case number is the one number the public most easily understands and most readily available, with the confirmed case number being the standard bearer for discussing the severity and impact of the disease worldwide.
Having said that...it would stand to reason that if Ontario ordered a lockdown when they only had 189 cases and a new case count of 30 or 40 per day, you'd think that there'd be no discussions- at all- about ending the lockdowns when we're still getting 521 new cases a day and our case total stands at 16,608. If the situation then merited a need for drastic measures, why would the situation right now be any different?
Yet there is Ontario Premier Doug Ford, announcing today that on May 4, certain businesses can reopen. They're most just small scale businesses that don't deal with a lot of people- home and garden centres with curbside pickup, auto dealerships by appointment only, marinas but only to prep for boating season and golf courses, but only for maintenance.
It's a very, very, very, very, very, very small relaxing of restrictions...but it's a relaxing of restrictions nonetheless, and Ford has promised to do more in the coming weeks.
Now, I will grant that- like many other jurisdictions around the world who are also beginning to open things back up- Ford is likely receiving growing pressure from businesses to relax restrictions and allow them to reopen.
I'll also concede that Ford has been more measured in his approach than that of other places, like everyone's favourite punching bag, the State of Florida, who began reopening their beaches on April 19, or the Province of Quebec, which plans to reopen just about everything in a matter of days (even bars) despite being much harder hit by COVID-19 than Ontario was.
Still, a reopening is a reopening and...you know that saying about floodgates. Once you open them, even a little, you can't stop the flood.
Before long, Ford's list of allowed reopenings will include just about everything, because everyone else will want in on the action too. Especially the hospitality industry and the entertainment industry, who need the summer tourist season as their moneymakers.
You may be wondering why I sound opposed to Ford's idea and that of so many other places reopening when I said I didn't support their closure in the first place. Aren't I getting what I want?
The problem is that I just don't see any real government strategy when it comes to dealing with COVID-19- it's just based on reactions and panic. Just how people panicking over whether they were going to get distressingly sick back in March forced the lockdowns, businesses panicking over their rent is what is driving governments to reopen in May.
...and, quite frankly, that shouldn't be happening. If certain conditions caused the government to respond in a certain way, then it stands to reason that the government should continue its response until it can demonstrate that its response needs to change.
In other words, if all it takes is Ontario to have 189 cases of COVID-19 and 30-40 new cases a day to impose a lockdown so "the healthcare system is not overwhelmed", then it should stand to reason that, until we get back to only having 30-40 new cases a day and 189 active cases (or thereabouts) then there shouldn't be any discussion about ending the lockdown.
Unless Ontario says that now they can handle this caseload, which raises questions about why they put in the lockdowns in the first place.
Ultimately this all goes back to the lack of transparency and foresight that has blighted the COVID-19 crisis. Not just have years of healthcare cuts hampered our ability to deal with the crisis now, the inability of the government to put in meaningful measures to mitigate a situation they created means they don't have any hope to get the public to all buy in to their strategy.
Because if governments really did care about public health, they'd develop a strategy and stick to it, and do everything they can to make sure that strategy is successful. No one should have to worry about making their rent or their bills in a time of crisis and it's utterly ridiculous that governments have failed to take that into account.
Because if the government isn't going to take this seriously, then why should I?
-Daniel Arnold
Helplessness and irrationality the real "covidiocy"
I have a lot of issues, questions and concerns when it comes to COVID-19. I'm sure I'm not the only one but, sadly, the ones who I'm looking for answers from don't seem to have those either.
I could devolve into the usual talking points- are we overestimating this disease or underestimating it? Are our responses appropriate or could we have done it another way? Can we afford to "tough it out" or will the cure be worse than the disease?
All those things are fair questions, and I've got an opinion on all of them. However, so do many other people and they're just as "informed" about COVID-19 as I am, so I'm not going to waste your time talking about them since I doubt I'll get anywhere.
What I will say, having been subjected to hearing about and thinking about this virus nonstop for the past two months or so, is that there's a few things that I am certain of:
To illustrate, let's go back two months, when COVID-19 first hit the Canadian province of Ontario (where I live). Even though a virus knows no political affiliation and doesn't care about ethnicity, there wasn't widespread worry about COVID-19 because it had only ravaged China and Iran.
Nobody seemed to worry- or care- about what might happen if COVID-19 took hold in our territory because, apparently we were "not China or Iran".
The worry seemed to only ramp up after Italy got hit pretty hard with COVID-19 and had to impose lockdowns akin to what the Chinese and Iranians had done. Even though Italy has its own host of problems (since 1953, only one Italian Prime Minister- Silvio Berlusconi, who had a few of them- had a term of at least four years), Italy was a "first world country that shouldn't have been hit by the virus"...but it was.
That spooked a lot of people and spurred the cancellation of events that, right now, seem to be the only news items we get these days.
However, despite all that, the response was tepid. For weeks, our government officials kept stressing "the risk of getting COVID-19 is low" and kept beating that line as the case count kept rising.
Then there was a report out of Toronto of someone who had COVID-19 who rode a few city transit buses, and did so during the packed morning rush hour.
"Someone was with an infectious disease in tight quarters able to spread that disease to so many other people"...but, again, the response from the government was "your risk of getting it is low".
Ah, OK. It also didn't help that many reports of COVID-19 state that the disease was pretty mild in the vast majority of cases, which only prompted more questions about its seriousness.
I mean, if we had a disease that spread easily but also killed the majority of those that it infected, I doubt anyone would question its severity.
So that's where we were in mid-March, constantly told that despite the fact this disease spreads easily, it was mostly mild and, more importantly, "my risk of catching COVID-19 was low".
I remember thinking at the time that COVID-19 was just going to be like swine flu- lots of PSAs about "keeping clean" and "keeping things clean" but, otherwise it would be "life as usual".
Then, on March 16, 2020- the day Ontario imposed its version of the COVID-19 lockdown- everything changed.
First, in a blink of an eye, my entire life was turned upside down, with Ontario imposing restrictions on my day-to-day life and personal autonomy. Doing that is bad enough, but doing it without warning and without having to justify it?
That's even scarier.
Then the messaging became more sobering and more sombre, treating COVID-19 like it was the second coming of the Black Death. We had to "prepare for the new normal", we're told, and we had to look at every stranger as if the mere sight of them would infect us with the plague.
To say that this was all confusing was an understatement- I'm not sure I have a word to describe the state of shock I was in.
I had so many questions, the very least of which was, "just 24 hours ago you kept saying you had this thing under control and kept telling us not to worry and now we have to worry? What gives?"
If Ontario had come out and said, "be prepared for a lockdown, which we will impose when X happens", I would have been able to accept it. I would have been able to further accept it if Ontario had come out and also said "when conditions are X, we can lift the lockdown".
None of those things happened, which gives me the impression that Ontario can impose a "state of emergency" whenever it wants and doesn't have to justify it. That should scare anyone, because there's no guarantee a future Premier won't abuse that privilege.
(An odd thing that, considering Ontario Premier Doug Ford almost went on a powertrip himself when he threatened to override the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in order to win his petty dispute with the City of Toronto, but I digress)
Then as the days progressed and the lockdown became more of a reality, the situation just got worse. Ezekiel Emmanuel, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, caused quite the stir when he said he thinks the lockdowns should last for 12-18 months, the timeframe the media keeps touting as a timeline for a therapeutic for COVID-19. He was particularly pointed about large gatherings, insisting that should be the last to reopnen.
Under normal conditions, I'm sure that news item would get the traction it got but under these conditions Emmanuel's claim didn't just gain traction- it influenced policy.
Which only really amps up my frustration and feelings of powerlessness because I know policymakers influenced by those items clearly weren't thinking.
First of all, Emmanuel- who was once an advisor to Barack Obama- does have the education background to have a bit more of an informed opinion than your usual Googler. However, he's not an epidemiologist, he doesn't work in COVID-19 research, he's not on the front lines in a hospital trying to treat patients infected with this thing...as my brother put it, he's like Wayne Gretzky giving his opinion on baseball. He might know a few things, but he shouldn't be your "go-to guy".
Besides, Emmanuel has a history of rabble rousing- in 1997, he opposed euthanasia before backtracking in 2016 and, in 2014, Emmanuel argued that living life after 75 was pointless (for the record, Emmanuel will be 63 in September 2020).
I really don't know why we would want to give this guy a huge platform. He sure doesn't sound like someone who I would trust to give me solutions in a time of a crisis.
I also wonder why Emmanuel gets a platform but Doctor Neil Rau, who vehemently opposed imposing a lockdown at all, gets no attention. I mean, not only is Rau a microbologist but, more importantly, he's a practicing doctor, meaning he's far more qualified to talk about COVID-19 considering he's at the front lines.
I guess he's "too positive". *shrugs*
Which is really the heart of the matter. Because of Emmanuel, you have Quebec insisting they can't have festivals until after August 31, and New Brunswick believing it needs to hold off on not just festivals but also bars and clubs until the rest of the year...even though New Brunswick hasn't had a COVID-19 case in a week.
So many different things about this virus changes from week to week, and just about everyone has gotten so many things horribly wrong about the virus every step of the way...frankly, it's reckless and irresponsible of policymakers to make such sweeping choices definitively so far into the future when the situation could be drastically different by that point.
Seriously, New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs...if, say, in July COVID-19 is gone from your province, is practically gone from Canada and it's contained in the United States...are you going to tell me it's still not "safe" for a bar to be open?
Speaking of deranged government policies- the lockdowns. Let me start by saying they're not even real lockdowns- they're these haphazard things with so many loopholes and vague generalities that, apart from anything "fun", there's nothing that's really "banned". How many people are truly locked down and, worse, who's really being protected?
I don't have any hard numbers, but I suspect most of the workers who are deemed "essential" are minimum wage earners who already had 50 reasons to hate their job and now have 50 more. I also wonder, how many of them really have to be open? Does getting a Tim Horton's coffee or a Big Mac really mean anything in a pandemic? Or any restaurant, for that matter? Why can't grocery stores be restricted to curbside pickup?
That's just the tip of the iceberg. What really bothers me is that policymakers in this crisis think more about crowds as opposed to crowding. The Scotiabank Arena, Rogers Centre, Downsview Park, etc. are more than large enough to host crowds of thousands and accommodate physical distancing, but gatherings there are "too risky" yet a grocery store, with its aisles barely big enough for one person, attended to by hundreds, if not thousands of people per day, all of whom touching and handling surfaces and products that- who knows who- has touched or sneezed on them...that's perfectly acceptable.
This is before getting to the fact that a lot of "essential business" declarations make a mockery of the lockdowns in general. A lot of attention has been paid to Florida in this regard, because Governor Ron DeSantisafter being influenced by Vince McMahon and Tony Khan decided that because wrestling is in the business of "providing entertainment", they're "essential" businesses. DeSantis also decreed that golf, too, is an essential business.
If you're not as lost about those decisions as I am...I have no words.
Canada too, doesn't get a pass, as Ontario and Alberta deemed their manufacturing and oil sectors as "essential" businesses before backtracking.
With so much confusion over what is essential and what isn't and the fact that governors' buddies seem to influence their list, it's small wonder why there are people who aren't taking the lockdowns seriously.
Why should they when the governments themselves don't do it?
The real sore spot, even amidst all that goes way beyond any debate over what measures we should or shouldn't take, what should be open and what shouldn't and whom we should or shouldn't listen to.
Because let me say this as loud and clear as I can:
The lack of foresight is the real crisis.
Let's be honest with ourselves- there wouldn't be this much worry and anxiety over the effects of the lockdowns if the people affected by them learned they'd be mitigated in a meaningful way.
I mean, if the government was going to pay me to stay home and make sure my bills are all paid, I'd do it forever, if they need me to do that.
(Well, maybe not forever...but you know what I mean)
That's really what all this anger is about. That's really what most people who downplay the virus or protest the lockdown restrictions are really angry about- the fact that the government can take away their livelihoods in the blink of an eye and then turn around and tell us to "deal with it", without giving us any way to actually deal with it.
Maybe instead of spending millions on condescending ads telling us how "heroic" we are, we should spend it on things like wiping out our utility bills, paying our medical costs and canceling our rents and mortgages.
You know, the stuff we go to work for only when the government doesn't stop our ability to go to work.
Further, why it took so long to start buying beds, ventilators and other hospital equipment is beyond me. Yeah, we can- and I do- fault the World Health Organization for its erratic messaging at the beginning of the outbreak and Chinese officials downplaying the virus, but this goes beyond that.
Our healthcare systems- worldwide- have been chronically mismanaged and woefully underfunded, meaning they're barely operational at the best of times so we had no hope in dealing with a pandemic.
While I grant it's no sure thing that if we had a better prepared health care system that we could have avoided the lockdowns, it's sure a tough pill to swallow knowing that at least part of the reason why I'm suffering through it is because governments failed to do all they could to prevent it.
Ford likes to call our healthcare providers "heroes" for all the work they're putting in...and I grant, that work is heroic. Just don't tell any of them that the reason why they're being asked to be heroes is because Ford slashed healthcare funding so much that the Ontario government wasn't at all prepared for the pandemic.
Yet I don't believe I've ever heard Ford even once apologize or acknowledge that his government's actions or inaction may have some blame in this. Even though the reality of the situation- in all likelihood- was far beyond his control, a little humility might at least show that he at least has some understanding of how we're truly feeling.
Because if there's one thing that will never be acceptable- before or after this virus- it's knowing you're suffering because of someone else's hubris.
Don't ask me to keep my head up if you're the one that knocked me down in the first place.
-Daniel Arnold
I could devolve into the usual talking points- are we overestimating this disease or underestimating it? Are our responses appropriate or could we have done it another way? Can we afford to "tough it out" or will the cure be worse than the disease?
All those things are fair questions, and I've got an opinion on all of them. However, so do many other people and they're just as "informed" about COVID-19 as I am, so I'm not going to waste your time talking about them since I doubt I'll get anywhere.
What I will say, having been subjected to hearing about and thinking about this virus nonstop for the past two months or so, is that there's a few things that I am certain of:
- A lot of people know how to use Google, but very few of them have any clue on how to think critically of what they're reading. Just like any other issue in the Web 2.0 days, people only use Google to reinforce what they already believe about COVID-19.
- Fear and panic have been all that's reigned during the pandemic, perpetuated by irresponsible media companies who should know better. I can't believe how quickly and easily the most negative news items surrounding COVID-19 spread, even though much of it is clearly extreme and is just pure speculation anyway.
- Worse, it's troubling how much policy is being dictated by fear and panic when you'd think politicians should know better.
- It's amazing- and saddening- at how easily we believe the words of someone who "appears" qualified to talk about COVID-19, even if what they say doesn't stand to scrutiny.
- It's also amazing- and saddening- at how easily we'll take whatever the government tells us about the pandemic and how easily we'll acquiesce our own power and rights to them without even a hint of scrutiny.
To illustrate, let's go back two months, when COVID-19 first hit the Canadian province of Ontario (where I live). Even though a virus knows no political affiliation and doesn't care about ethnicity, there wasn't widespread worry about COVID-19 because it had only ravaged China and Iran.
Nobody seemed to worry- or care- about what might happen if COVID-19 took hold in our territory because, apparently we were "not China or Iran".
The worry seemed to only ramp up after Italy got hit pretty hard with COVID-19 and had to impose lockdowns akin to what the Chinese and Iranians had done. Even though Italy has its own host of problems (since 1953, only one Italian Prime Minister- Silvio Berlusconi, who had a few of them- had a term of at least four years), Italy was a "first world country that shouldn't have been hit by the virus"...but it was.
That spooked a lot of people and spurred the cancellation of events that, right now, seem to be the only news items we get these days.
However, despite all that, the response was tepid. For weeks, our government officials kept stressing "the risk of getting COVID-19 is low" and kept beating that line as the case count kept rising.
Then there was a report out of Toronto of someone who had COVID-19 who rode a few city transit buses, and did so during the packed morning rush hour.
"Someone was with an infectious disease in tight quarters able to spread that disease to so many other people"...but, again, the response from the government was "your risk of getting it is low".
Ah, OK. It also didn't help that many reports of COVID-19 state that the disease was pretty mild in the vast majority of cases, which only prompted more questions about its seriousness.
I mean, if we had a disease that spread easily but also killed the majority of those that it infected, I doubt anyone would question its severity.
So that's where we were in mid-March, constantly told that despite the fact this disease spreads easily, it was mostly mild and, more importantly, "my risk of catching COVID-19 was low".
I remember thinking at the time that COVID-19 was just going to be like swine flu- lots of PSAs about "keeping clean" and "keeping things clean" but, otherwise it would be "life as usual".
Then, on March 16, 2020- the day Ontario imposed its version of the COVID-19 lockdown- everything changed.
First, in a blink of an eye, my entire life was turned upside down, with Ontario imposing restrictions on my day-to-day life and personal autonomy. Doing that is bad enough, but doing it without warning and without having to justify it?
That's even scarier.
Then the messaging became more sobering and more sombre, treating COVID-19 like it was the second coming of the Black Death. We had to "prepare for the new normal", we're told, and we had to look at every stranger as if the mere sight of them would infect us with the plague.
To say that this was all confusing was an understatement- I'm not sure I have a word to describe the state of shock I was in.
I had so many questions, the very least of which was, "just 24 hours ago you kept saying you had this thing under control and kept telling us not to worry and now we have to worry? What gives?"
If Ontario had come out and said, "be prepared for a lockdown, which we will impose when X happens", I would have been able to accept it. I would have been able to further accept it if Ontario had come out and also said "when conditions are X, we can lift the lockdown".
None of those things happened, which gives me the impression that Ontario can impose a "state of emergency" whenever it wants and doesn't have to justify it. That should scare anyone, because there's no guarantee a future Premier won't abuse that privilege.
(An odd thing that, considering Ontario Premier Doug Ford almost went on a powertrip himself when he threatened to override the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in order to win his petty dispute with the City of Toronto, but I digress)
Then as the days progressed and the lockdown became more of a reality, the situation just got worse. Ezekiel Emmanuel, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, caused quite the stir when he said he thinks the lockdowns should last for 12-18 months, the timeframe the media keeps touting as a timeline for a therapeutic for COVID-19. He was particularly pointed about large gatherings, insisting that should be the last to reopnen.
Under normal conditions, I'm sure that news item would get the traction it got but under these conditions Emmanuel's claim didn't just gain traction- it influenced policy.
Which only really amps up my frustration and feelings of powerlessness because I know policymakers influenced by those items clearly weren't thinking.
First of all, Emmanuel- who was once an advisor to Barack Obama- does have the education background to have a bit more of an informed opinion than your usual Googler. However, he's not an epidemiologist, he doesn't work in COVID-19 research, he's not on the front lines in a hospital trying to treat patients infected with this thing...as my brother put it, he's like Wayne Gretzky giving his opinion on baseball. He might know a few things, but he shouldn't be your "go-to guy".
Besides, Emmanuel has a history of rabble rousing- in 1997, he opposed euthanasia before backtracking in 2016 and, in 2014, Emmanuel argued that living life after 75 was pointless (for the record, Emmanuel will be 63 in September 2020).
I really don't know why we would want to give this guy a huge platform. He sure doesn't sound like someone who I would trust to give me solutions in a time of a crisis.
I also wonder why Emmanuel gets a platform but Doctor Neil Rau, who vehemently opposed imposing a lockdown at all, gets no attention. I mean, not only is Rau a microbologist but, more importantly, he's a practicing doctor, meaning he's far more qualified to talk about COVID-19 considering he's at the front lines.
I guess he's "too positive". *shrugs*
Which is really the heart of the matter. Because of Emmanuel, you have Quebec insisting they can't have festivals until after August 31, and New Brunswick believing it needs to hold off on not just festivals but also bars and clubs until the rest of the year...even though New Brunswick hasn't had a COVID-19 case in a week.
So many different things about this virus changes from week to week, and just about everyone has gotten so many things horribly wrong about the virus every step of the way...frankly, it's reckless and irresponsible of policymakers to make such sweeping choices definitively so far into the future when the situation could be drastically different by that point.
Seriously, New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs...if, say, in July COVID-19 is gone from your province, is practically gone from Canada and it's contained in the United States...are you going to tell me it's still not "safe" for a bar to be open?
Speaking of deranged government policies- the lockdowns. Let me start by saying they're not even real lockdowns- they're these haphazard things with so many loopholes and vague generalities that, apart from anything "fun", there's nothing that's really "banned". How many people are truly locked down and, worse, who's really being protected?
I don't have any hard numbers, but I suspect most of the workers who are deemed "essential" are minimum wage earners who already had 50 reasons to hate their job and now have 50 more. I also wonder, how many of them really have to be open? Does getting a Tim Horton's coffee or a Big Mac really mean anything in a pandemic? Or any restaurant, for that matter? Why can't grocery stores be restricted to curbside pickup?
That's just the tip of the iceberg. What really bothers me is that policymakers in this crisis think more about crowds as opposed to crowding. The Scotiabank Arena, Rogers Centre, Downsview Park, etc. are more than large enough to host crowds of thousands and accommodate physical distancing, but gatherings there are "too risky" yet a grocery store, with its aisles barely big enough for one person, attended to by hundreds, if not thousands of people per day, all of whom touching and handling surfaces and products that- who knows who- has touched or sneezed on them...that's perfectly acceptable.
This is before getting to the fact that a lot of "essential business" declarations make a mockery of the lockdowns in general. A lot of attention has been paid to Florida in this regard, because Governor Ron DeSantis
If you're not as lost about those decisions as I am...I have no words.
Canada too, doesn't get a pass, as Ontario and Alberta deemed their manufacturing and oil sectors as "essential" businesses before backtracking.
With so much confusion over what is essential and what isn't and the fact that governors' buddies seem to influence their list, it's small wonder why there are people who aren't taking the lockdowns seriously.
Why should they when the governments themselves don't do it?
The real sore spot, even amidst all that goes way beyond any debate over what measures we should or shouldn't take, what should be open and what shouldn't and whom we should or shouldn't listen to.
Because let me say this as loud and clear as I can:
The lack of foresight is the real crisis.
Let's be honest with ourselves- there wouldn't be this much worry and anxiety over the effects of the lockdowns if the people affected by them learned they'd be mitigated in a meaningful way.
I mean, if the government was going to pay me to stay home and make sure my bills are all paid, I'd do it forever, if they need me to do that.
(Well, maybe not forever...but you know what I mean)
That's really what all this anger is about. That's really what most people who downplay the virus or protest the lockdown restrictions are really angry about- the fact that the government can take away their livelihoods in the blink of an eye and then turn around and tell us to "deal with it", without giving us any way to actually deal with it.
Maybe instead of spending millions on condescending ads telling us how "heroic" we are, we should spend it on things like wiping out our utility bills, paying our medical costs and canceling our rents and mortgages.
You know, the stuff we go to work for only when the government doesn't stop our ability to go to work.
Further, why it took so long to start buying beds, ventilators and other hospital equipment is beyond me. Yeah, we can- and I do- fault the World Health Organization for its erratic messaging at the beginning of the outbreak and Chinese officials downplaying the virus, but this goes beyond that.
Our healthcare systems- worldwide- have been chronically mismanaged and woefully underfunded, meaning they're barely operational at the best of times so we had no hope in dealing with a pandemic.
While I grant it's no sure thing that if we had a better prepared health care system that we could have avoided the lockdowns, it's sure a tough pill to swallow knowing that at least part of the reason why I'm suffering through it is because governments failed to do all they could to prevent it.
Ford likes to call our healthcare providers "heroes" for all the work they're putting in...and I grant, that work is heroic. Just don't tell any of them that the reason why they're being asked to be heroes is because Ford slashed healthcare funding so much that the Ontario government wasn't at all prepared for the pandemic.
Yet I don't believe I've ever heard Ford even once apologize or acknowledge that his government's actions or inaction may have some blame in this. Even though the reality of the situation- in all likelihood- was far beyond his control, a little humility might at least show that he at least has some understanding of how we're truly feeling.
Because if there's one thing that will never be acceptable- before or after this virus- it's knowing you're suffering because of someone else's hubris.
Don't ask me to keep my head up if you're the one that knocked me down in the first place.
-Daniel Arnold
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