Upgrading our health care systems should be the real goal to beat COVID-19

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