I've tried to suggest that "living with Covid" needs to mean something more than just trying to roll back the clock and ditch as many restrictions and public health measures as possible in what will be an effort to "get back to normal." Instead, it means recognizing the endemic quality of a dangerous disease. That will necessarily means that we cannot ask the most vulnerable elements of our population to bear the burden our normalcy because that will, in effect, mean that one person will suffer (pay the price) for another's benefits (behaving as if there were no disease). Instead, we need to recognize that there will be changes to the way we live our lives. Most of these changes, I'd argue, do not impose any loss of freedom or challenge rights. They are minor restrictions that can and should be accepted as the minimum action we can take in order to help ensure the security of citizens living under the conditions of an endemic virus. I am optimistic that, with further medical advancements, these kinds of limitations will lessen over time, but I don't think they will disappear entirely. Or, at least I think they shouldn't. We will, for instance, still need to have provide for outbreaks, localized lockdowns, new variants, booster shots, access to new medications, and potentially a range of other factors.
I hope you can see my point: living with Covid does not mean doing nothing. On the contrary, it means being better prepared for public health emergencies. (If I had my way, I'd extend this to other potential emergency situations, as well, like, for instance, climate. change. I don't means to suggest that Covid is somehow unique as an emergency. But, it makes a good example because it is current and that can, I hope, allow us to also think about other issues and preparedness in general.) One of the problems with the early stages of the pandemic was that Canada was not prepared. I suspect that planners knew we should be but were caught between a rock and a hard place. I've not had to plan for a pandemic but I've been involved in administration and I suspect I know what is going on.
Preparedness requires money. You need to buy a bunch of stuff and keep that stuff on hand in case it is needed. In the case of Covid, this included PPE, ventilators, hospital capacity, medicines, isolation capacity, among other things. We also needed human capacity on a significant scale. One of the problems with preparedness stuff is that you keep it on hand but don't use it. It is stored somewhere (in basements, warehouses, etc.) and, if you are the planner (the government officials and civil servants in charge of preparedness), you really, really hope you never use it. That's right: you go out and buy tonnes of stuff that sits around with the aim of not using it.
I suspect you can see why this instantaneously becomes a problem. Governments don't like stuff sitting around unused. For more than one reasons, governments are always looking to cut spending. They look to cut spending because some governments simply disagree with government spending, because they need to balance the books, because there is more than one good cause on which to spend (that is, there are multiple demands for government funding). And, if you are the government of the day, there are opposition parties that are sitting around telling Canadians that if they just elect them, things will get better. They will balance the books or provide a tax cut. In this situation, governments -- just about any government -- will look to control costs. An NDP government (hypothetically) will not necessarily want to cut taxes but they tend to not want to raise them and they tend to want to spend the money on things that citizens need in the here and now. It is not just moderate Liberal or right-wing Conservative governments that can run into this problem.
The result is that governments tend to skimp on preparedness. You might even feel for them. After all, leaving all this stuff sitting around hoping we don't use it seems like a dead loss, a waste of resources. If we didn't spend the money on stuff that will sit in a warehouse, someone might reason, we can spend it on other things: safe roads, proper water supplies for Indigenous communities, keeping post-secondary tuition within the bounds of reason, doctors and nurses for rural communities, new schools. The temptation to skimp grows and it grows more and more if you get away with it. If you skimp on preparedness spending one year and we don't have enough PPE on hand for a health emergency but *there is no health emergency* -- well, that skimping seemed to pay off. If you were a Conservative government, you could take that money that you did not spend on PPE (or, other preparedness measures) and turn it into a tax cut. If this goes on for a number of years, well ... that is the problem. Each year you "get away" with not spending on preparedness (which is, again, buying stuff you will not use), a greater gulf opens up between what you have on hand (preparedness) and what you will need if there is an emergency.
That is what happened in the early stages of the pandemic. Moreover, it didn't just happen to the government (although government is easiest to fault). What we discovered is that same thing was going on in the private health care sectors as well, such as senior citizen care facilities. We know the Ontario situation best because the situation seemed particularly bad but I suspect it was not unusual. What we saw was that private seniors care facilities simply did not have a stock of PPE on hand. Government regulation was shockingly limited (in some cases, it appears that no inspectors visited facilities). And, human capacity was lacking. Each of these factors combined to create a disaster. Seniors dying and a complete breakdown, in some instances, of services that could only be addressed by the military.
More recently, we've seen this again and this time, and I will confess, it is more than a bit annoying. We've seen a lack of rapid test supplies and, in NB at least, no public distribution of N95 masks.
What does all this mean for "living with Covid?" It means that we need to learn to think in a different way. We have to take preparedness seriously. That means that we need to be willing to commit the resources we need to ensuring that we're ready for the next wave even if that wave does not come. Why is this a "bigger issue?" Because it costs money and potentially a lot of money that may never be recouped. If we are taking the idea of having a proactive policy to live with Covid seriously, it will mean that we will buy a bunch of stuff that will -- ideally -- never be used. Where are we going to get the money to buy this stuff? Two places and they are both the same place: taxes and charges that private businesses levee for things like senior care facilities. You can see why it is a big issue. If we are going to live with Covid, taxes will almost certainly need to increase.
Is that good? Is that right? Is that fair? I don't have the space to address those issues. It seems to me that we need, however, to address this matter as a society. In fact, a willingness to commit the resources that we need to preparedness might be a sign of the degree to which one is actually willing to live with Covid.
No comments:
Post a Comment