The Human Cost of Ontario’s COVID-19 In-Action Plan
Nearly one-third of all Ontario COVID-19 cases since the pandemic began have taken place in a single month. No, that month wasn’t back in March, April or even May during the initial lockdown of the province. That month is right now — December. Yet you wouldn’t know it by the Ontario Government’s current approach to managing the virus. Take the week before Christmas as just one example.
On the evening of Thursday, December 17, Queen’s Park reporters filled Twitter feeds with the breaking news that a province-wide lockdown was imminent and an announcement by the Premier the following day would effectively cancel Christmas. Maybe that was the initial plan. But that’s not what happened.
Instead, on Friday, December 18, the Premier stepped in front of a podium and provided no new guidance or protective measures as the final retail weekend before the holidays kicked off. The following Monday, the Premier finally announced that while infection rates and deaths were soaring, the urgency of a lockdown could wait until after Christmas and come into effect on Boxing Day.
During that one-week delay, 18,154 more people received positive test results for COVID-19. That number is roughly the size of the entire population of Huntsville, a community located near the Premier’s cottage, which he visited during the first lockdown and where he is rumoured to have spent at least some of the Christmas lockdown. More devastatingly, over that same week, another 261 people across the province died of COVID-19. Those deaths recorded in just one week represent nearly 6% of total deaths from the virus in 2020.
December 18 wasn’t just the day that Premier Ford failed to introduce a timely lockdown that could have kept more people safe over the holidays. It was also the day that Ontario surpassed 150,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, roughly half the total number of infections experienced by the province during the entire Spanish Flu epidemic.
A week later on December 26, Ontario reached a second grim milestone: 4,359 deaths from COVID-19 or 51% of the total number of deaths the province suffered during the Spanish Flu a century earlier. The toll of that earlier pandemic was so severe that it led to the creation of a federal department of health in Canada to ensure that the country would never be caught flat-footed again as a pandemic raged and citizens began to die.
In the Ford Government, the response could not be more different. There has been no broad recognition of these milestones, no context-setting for the general public about how dangerous the situation currently is, and no rush to vaccinate the public as infection numbers and the risk of more lives lost both continue to climb.
The opposite has taken place. Ford’s Minister of Finance Rod Phillips has been recalled from a vacation in exclusive St. Barts, one he departed on as his government asked small businesses to close their doors and Ontarians to celebrate the holidays alone. While a holiday lockdown sends a serious message, it has been undercut by the consistent ‘do as I say, not as I do’ approach taken throughout the pandemic by the Premier, his cabinet ministers, and his caucus.
Like Phillips, the Ford Government’s vaccination rollout plan also took a break over the holidays, pausing for several days even as the number of infections and deaths continued to rise. When it shut down for the holidays, the Government had administered just 13,200 of 90,000 doses available for use in Ontario in the first month of the rollout.
To date, Ontario’s Minister of Health Christine Elliott has yet to mention those who have died from COVID-19 in any of her daily twitter updates reporting Ontario’s latest COVID-19 data. Even as she continues to ignore them, every single one of those deaths represents a deep, personal loss to loved ones who must say goodbye at a distance without the comforting embrace of those who still remain with us.
We are now in the most dangerous phase of this fight — exhaustion is rampant, vigilance is slipping, and the virus is spreading faster than ever before. Nearly 70% of all positive COVID-19 tests came back between October and December. More people have tested positive for the virus in December alone than did during the first eight months of the outbreak combined. And nearly 1 in 5 people who have lost their lives to COVID-19 have died this December.
We began December with hope as the vaccine arrived in Ontario and the Premier promised a quick and orderly rollout to those most at risk from the virus. Instead, the government has been forced to publicly apologize for its multiple failures just two weeks into a vaccine rollout plan that the Premier has touted for months.
The people of Ontario have been exceedingly patient as we’ve waited for politicians to put forward an effective action plan to keep the curve flattened, protect the most vulnerable, support struggling families and businesses, and successfully bring an end to the pandemic through province-wide vaccination. This deadly second wave has made clear that time is running out. History tells us what’s at risk: nearly 90% of deaths during the Spanish Flu took place during that pandemic’s deadly second wave. With a vaccine now available, we can’t afford to let history repeat.
Instead, the people of Ontario deserve an activist response from a government that leads by example. Our lives depend on it. Continuing to do the bare minimum is a dereliction of duty that will lead to more and increasingly avoidable deaths in the months ahead.
