This insanity cannot be allowed to continue

A steady increase in COVID-19-related admissions to hospitals and intensive care units continues to weigh heavily on Canada’s health-care system even as overall case counts begin to decline, the country’s chief public health officer said Saturday.

Dr. Theresa Tam outlined a more than 20 per cent increase in both hospitalizations and ICU patients over a one-week stretch, as well as a much more modest decline in overall infection counts over the same period. CBC News

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Over the past 15 months, Dr. Theresa Tam has yet to make any useful predictions or pronouncements, has repeatedly contracted herself, and is adept at stating the obvious only after it becomes obvious.

This babble is straight from the global warming and climate change playbook. When the facts don’t fit the expert narrative, change the goalposts. If we don’t have enough new cases to keep people alarmed, switch to tracking hospital admissions.

It is politically prudent for hospitals to claim to be overwhelmed and short-staffed to pry more money from politicians. Politicians have ignored our deteriorating health care systems for decades. Fixing the systems requires an increase in taxes. Provincial politicians would rather leap from the top of their legislatures than increase taxes, so they blame the federal government for not providing enough health care support.

We - Don’t - Care. 

We have one pocket to pick. Whether the federal, provincial or civic government is taxing us is not as important as building a robust health care system that will not collapse when we most need it. From the outset, we did not have the equipment or supplies to deal with an epidemic.

We had emergency plans in place to deal with an epidemic but tossed them when the coronavirus hit. That may have been because our governments had failed to follow their emergency plans and did not want to admit they were derelict in their duty.

They embarked on an untested lockdown and isolation plan instead. The theoretical plan kept failing, and governments insisted that people, not the plans, were at fault. Despite evidence that lockdowns and isolation were not effective wherever regulations were bent to allow international travel and essential workers, governments persisted in issuing more restrictive measures instead of plugging travel and essential workers holes.

Federal sleight of hand 

The federal budget just released included plans to embark on a national daycare plan which requires equal participation by provinces already strapped for cash. We do not need to chase a shiny new program until our health care system is repaired and robust enough to meet our growing needs.

The federal government needs to allow provinces to innovate in how health care is delivered. We need to work smarter.

Provinces need to work together to ensure universal access to health care portable from province to province and develop modern electronic record-keeping to allow nationwide health care system access to public health records and patient records.

We need to rebuild our emergency epidemic planning and ensure that all elements are in place and kept up to date. We have had hard lessons in the consequences of failing to do so. It must not recur.

Governments cannot focus on vaccine programs while ignoring unco-ordinated, under-staffed health care systems collapsing under the weight of ineffective bureaucracies that suck up too many of our health care dollars.

The insanity has to end.