How to Fail. A Story of Ontario.
As I write this, the COVID-19 case count in my home province is trending up again. It is early I admit, but from past experience that trend upward will continue for a while. I want to be wrong. I hope I am wrong. I have zero faith that I am.
It didn’t need to be this way. From mid 2020 on, Ontario had all of the tools at its disposal to contain and manage this pandemic. We didn’t need to let so many people become ill. We didn’t need to let so many people die. And yet, the Doug Ford government chose to let this happen. The Doug Ford government ignored the tools it had available and chose inexplicable options time and time again.
It has become repetitive to say that other countries handled this pandemic better. In Canada, the maritime provinces and Newfoundland and Labrador handled it better. We don’t have to look that far for examples of how to do better.
What all those other regions had in common was that they eliminated the unknowns. If they didn’t know how someone was infected, they locked down/isolated/quarantined until the unknown sources are gone. To manage this pandemic we have to know where every case is. We have to know every potential exposure and track and trace and lock it down. We cannot live with constant uncertainty.
But that is how we have been living the last year. We’re almost at the first anniversary of the first lockdown, and we have been living with uncertainty the whole time.
That, more than anything else, is what angers and confounds me every day. This province chooses not to know what it needs to know. Chooses not to take measures to eliminate the unknowns.
Instead we look at projections and graphs and hope things will work out in our favour. And then they don’t. We hear constant messages that we, the people, have to take control and be responsible. Be responsible and go to the gym! Go to a restaurant! Have a wedding! But we have no clear proof that any of those activities are safe. All we have are odds that nobody in the room with us has COVID-19. And those odds are calculated based on the average case count in the region we live in.
It’s such a strange way to do things. I find that words are inadequate to express how inane it is to rely on an “only 5% probability someone near me has COVID-19” safety measure. (Or whatever the number is. I must admit, I stopped monitoring it.)
We rely on math to set out the projections of what may happen, but we don’t do a damned thing to eliminate the uncertainty in those projections. We hear the word “if” and gamble on that “if” hoping it will work out.
I look at all of the needless death, suffering and economic uncertainty that we have endured. And I know it didn’t have to be this way. Our government failed us. Doug Ford and all of his Ministers are criminally negligent and woefully incompetent.
It didn’t have to be this way. But it’s the way that was imposed on us by those entrusted to do better.
