I have strong opinions about this.
Covid already had a low mortality rate, and with the majority of the most vulnerable now vaccinated, the effective mortality rate is even lower. Right now we have more new cases per day than ever before, but the mortality rate is still in the teens. While each of those death is sad, of course, and I certainly wouldn't be so statistically detached were one of my loved ones among them, the fact still is that for a province of 13 million, 10-20 people is not enough to justify the massive economic, physical and mental health damage being wrought by our covid response.
But the mortality is not the primary justification for the response. Rather, we are told that the reason is that we need to protect our health care system from being overwhelmed.
First off, our healthcare system has been overwhelmed for years. Despite the desperate rhetoric you hear these days about "total breakdown" and "bursting at the seams" , the truth is our hospitals have been well over capacity for a long time, and the "hallway medicine" they're holding up as a bogeyman now has been the norm for years already.
Note this CBC article: the majority of GTA hospitals prior to covid were at 95-100% capacity for most of the year prior to covid:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ ... -1.5420434Obviously that problem has been years in the making, so we can't merely blame the current government.
And certainly I'm not trying to say that status quo is acceptable - it's really not. Circumstances should never have been allowed to get that bad even before covid.
I'm just saying that should stop breathlessly repeating high capacity statistics every day as if this is the first time our health care system has been over burdened.
And while our current government may not be to blame for the problem they inherited, I think I can certainly blame them for the problems today. They've had a year now to ramp up icu capacity. A year. That should have been more than enough time to build beds and train nurses. We built planes and trained pilots in less time than that in ww2. A full year in, we should no longer be talking about flattening the curve in order to protect the health care system. Rather, we should be talking about how our ramped up healthcare system is capable of stepping up and meeting the curve.
But because of that failure to build capacity in the last year, that's why we're stuck in lock down now. I have canoe reservations in June that were very hard to get this year. So help me if they get auto-cancelled because of the government's failure to increase hospital capacity!