OrilliaMatters welcomes letters to the editor. This letter is in response to the province's handling of the pandemic. Send your letters to [email protected]
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I am dreading today's expected announcement from Premier Doug Ford, who will talk about the numbers and the projections, scold the populace in some hokey fashion about how we didn't behave and how he has made it clear all along what to do and likely end his press conference with an exasperated “and I pray to God.”
The thing is the conditions that would have us “survive” COVID were within his power; we are where we are today because it was within his power.
To be surrounded by so-called experts of his choosing and to ignore all the experts in the field, to not use the vast resources of the public service and their long-standing expertise and to remain in a state of denial about what decisive action to take?
The fact that there will be an announcement today because his cabinet had to meet on a Monday speaks to this fact. Does no one realize that COVID doesn't take the weekend off or pause till Christmas shopping is done?
In the spring, leadership went along with experts because there were so many unknowns, but as soon as we started to learn more, decisions became subjective. How we got to this point with so many “knowns'' is beyond me. It demonstrates a willful ignorance or a bumbling negligence; I think, in this province, it waffles between the two.
You only have to look at long term care (LTC) homes. They were doing well throughout the summer and COVID crept back in throughout the fall after Ford promised an “iron ring” around LTC homes in the spring; after the army was brought in.
Do you think that workers were out partying in the summer; willfully ignoring health and safety protocols? Health-care workers that have been front and centre all these years to the kind of havoc that a common cold or influenza can have on an elderly population? I trust that LTC healthcare workers are not the problem.
And the schools...let’s put a group of kids together, sometimes in a space more crowded than previous years and expect them to behave differently. Behave differently than what?
Children being asymptomatic carriers of the virus; back and forth to school and home. Imagine the kind of transmission that has been happening in the last four months with an absolute denial from the minister of education as to how high the transmission rate was the week before school holidays but blaming families for spreading the virus being at home for Christmas break.
The schools are safe, he said. Nearly 5,000 addresses across the province, absolutely safe, but once kids stay home for a few days that’s when all hell breaks loose. Yes, that is an “educated” statement.
But there is equal denial in workplaces but only at big business; warehouses, manufacturing, processing....Amazon has had more than 400 cases in Brampton. And what’s closed right now?
This government prioritizes big business over small, corporations over “mom and pop” shops, the rich who can work from home over essential workers and working adults over the youngest and the oldest. These last two groups are most expendable; the eldest because there is nothing to be gained financially from them anymore and the very young because very little has been invested in them financially yet.
Just because we are doing better than our neighbours to the south doesn't mean we are doing well. How amazing was it that New Zealand has reached COVID Zero!
It was political will that in turn got public opinion on side; leadership, education, science ... all things that seem antithetical to this government’s mindset. New Zealand’s goal was COVID zero; even if they fell short of that, still, close to perfect... like Atlantic Canada.
I’d say that hindsight is 20/20 but that would be crass and wrong; it was the choices that they didn't choose to make that brought us here, plain and simple. It was within our reach but beyond their political will.
Ellen Wolper
Orillia
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