Intuitive Lessons from The Pandemic – A Fantasy

This post is not based on comprehensive research or particular expertise on my part. Rather it is more what we would have called “common sense” before Mike Harris completely destroyed the meaning of the phrase.

We start off with the most obvious. We need a public health care system that is not overloaded to begin with. We can solve two problems here, provide pandemic readiness and provide timely life enhancing health care. We currently provide timely care for life threatening situations like cancer, heart surgery and emergency trauma but have created an artificial class of so called “elective surgery” we consider to be of lesser importance. This includes things like hip and knee surgery and replacements and many other types of health care that are necessary to allow people to live fulfilling lives. Health care is much more than preventing premature deaths. If we provided the necessary resources to provide all necessary health care without unreasonable wait times we would have the capacity to deal with a pandemic without putting peoples lives at risk.

Equally obvious is the need to bring long term care into the public health care system. Before the pandemic the horror stories of private long term care were well known even if the body counts were not as inexcusable as they became with the pandemic meeting the profit motive.

And still looking at the health care system, why did doctors offices shut down or become virtual during the pandemic when they should have been part of the response to it. Family physicians provide the first source of diagnosis for many serious illnesses like heart disease and cancer where early detection can be a matter of life and death. The system may respond quickly when these diseases are diagnosed but it does not respond at all when they are not detected. And why was the network of family physicians not used for pandemic testing and vaccinations.

And what of government policies. The big thing we got right was vaccines. In comparison to some jurisdictions to the south of us, all jurisdictions understand the importance and effectiveness of vaccines. The federal government did an admirable job of making vaccines available to the provinces and the provinces did a decent job in administering them. The main things Ontario could have done better was utilizing doctors offices and the school system to more efficiently get vaccines to the public.

As to the timely and appropriate response to the threat that is where we could have done better. We knew it was coming but we didn’t know what it would be like so it was a learning process. There is lots to criticize in hindsight but more importantly is learning going forward.

The biggest lesson was that internationally jurisdictions that put public health first and took strong, even drastic, measures quickly were able to get out of it faster than those that took half measures being more concerned with protecting the so-called economy than the public’s health. Having a provincial leader that considered himself a “businessman first” and by implication a Premier second did not help. We are still stumbling through in Ontario.

What is saving us is our sense of community. This works on two levels. On the personal level, it means in our personal behaviour, such as distancing, mask wearing and getting vaccinated, we base our decisions not just on what will keep us safe but also on what will keep our neighbours safe. This has made the big difference on how Canada has fared, compared to the United States, who arguably had better resources available to fight the pandemic.

The other level is the collective level, our collective actions taken together through our governments.

Here we are talking about three levels of government, federal, provincial and local, sometimes with differing philosophies and priorities. We really need to find a way to make federalism work better in these sorts of, not just national but international emergencies, climate change being another example.

If the pandemic has shown us anything is that individual action cannot replace collective action, and some things are just done better by acting collectively rather than acting individually. This is where we need to do better, particularly by strengthening our health care system and providing social supports. We are not financially prepared for the next pandemic because the political parties in power have chosen to go down the populist road of under-taxation thinking that would buy them votes. This is perhaps the most disastrous public policy position of the last half century.

Fortunately, because of that trend, there is substantial room to increase taxes to fill the void, particularly on that portion of the population that are excessively wealthy and under-taxed. This is a group in society that actually stands to gain more from collective spending by government than they can from individual spending by themselves. There is only so much you can spend on a wealthy lifestyle and the benefits of a better society far outweigh the benefits of people who have everything buying more everything for themselves.

We can be better prepared next time, and there will be a next time, but only if we choose to.

And the fantasy part – the belief that those in power will actually choose to learn these lessons and implement the necessary measures.