It’s hard to believe it’s been a whole year since the provincial government declared a state of emergency over COVID-19, a week after the World Health Organization officially classified the coronavirus as a pandemic.
In hindsight, the province probably waited a week too late. If Doug Ford had acted in lockstep with the WHO, he likely wouldn’t have told Ontario families to “travel” and “have fun” during the March Break – at the same time, he was ordering schools to remain closed for two weeks after March Break. They would remain closed for the rest of the school year.
His exact words were “Go away. Have a good time. Enjoy yourselves. And we’re going to be monitoring the situation as it changes every single day.”
Well, it did change every single day as the number of cases went from just 59 when he said those words to 7,470 in just four weeks.
Under the state of emergency, restaurants and gyms were ordered to close indefiniely. A week later, the closure ordered was extended to all non-essential businesses in the province for 14 days. They were eventually allowed to reopen under strict protocols in May and June.
Those were the early days when no one knew how bad things would get or long the pandemic would last.
There was hope that warmer weather would curb the spread of the virus which it did, but it surged again with a vengeance when the Labour Day weekend coincided with school reopenings.
Further surges occurred following the Thanksgiving Day weekend and the Christmas break when Ford made the ill-advised decision to delay a shutdown 48 hours from midnight Christmas Eve to midnight Boxing Day.
A decline followed from mid-January to mid-February which has now plateaued as businesses were allowed to reopen under the province’s colour-coded system.
Looking back, there are several things that could have been differently and some still haven’t been done.
When Doug Ford first declared a state of emergency and began shutting schools and non-essential businesses down while warning residents to stay indoors except when having to buy groceries, etc., he did so in order to prevent a surge on health care resources and to buy time.
Unfortunately, during the months since then, the province hasn’t invested a single dollar to increase hospital and ICU capacity – even though they were warned that a second wave in the fall was inevitable.
They’ve also done nothing to improve the ventilation systems in our public schools despite the irrefutable evidence that the COVID-19 virus is spread through the air and that people living and working in poorly ventilated environments are much more likely to catch it.
They are companies that make commerical air purifiers that can be installed on existing commercial HVAC systems that use HEPA air filters and UV filtration to kill the virus, yet the province refuse to invest any money on the one thing that can keep kids and teachers safe from the virus while in the schools.
But as bad as all that is, the biggest failure has been in not adequately protecting our most vulnerable residents living in long-term care and retirement homes.
The province should have imposed an across the board visitors ban from day one. Instead, they waited several days before imposing a ban on visitors to long-term care homes and then several days more before extending it to privately run retirement communities.
In the meantime, the virus was being spread by senior home staff, many of whom worked at multiple facilities in order to make ends meet. As a result, over a thousand outbreaks have occurred in long-term care and retirement homes across the province, causing more than 3,700 deaths, many of which could have been prevented with better screening, a greater availability of personal protective equipment for staff and more timely testing.
There’s a lot that can be learned from the mistakes of the past. Here’s hoping we can learn the lessons of the mistakes made during the current pandemic and never forget.
Here’s also hoping that we get vaccinated sooner rather than later and that the second anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic will be a lot happier than the first.
(If you wish
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