This pandemic has us all fed up and anxious for the end of restrictions. When the virus first started to take hold, we worked together: unlike in some other countries, there was no denial. All levels of government, and all political parties, acknowledged the seriousness of the situation. Canadians complied, and our results were better than many other countries.
The recent surge in cases has understandably led to a less positive reaction in our fatigued lockdown population. Suddenly we are being compared unfavourably to countries that had done much worse than us. And blame is being spread around.
It’s time to put it in perspective. In terms of cases per capita, Canada is 84th in the world. Far behind the US (8th), Switzerland (27th), the UK (41st), and many other first-world countries. And, arguably the litmus test, in deaths per capita, we are 62nd. The UK is at 13th, and the US at 14th recorded more than twice as many deaths per capita as Canada.
Again, many other first-world countries have far more deaths by population than we have had. Those that have done significantly better are mostly either culturally much less committed to freedom or are island nations who were able with aggressive early measures to eradicate the virus.
Could we have done better? Of course, with hindsight. But we worked with the same information as others, and our overall outcomes have been better than most. There may be an argument that more or fewer deaths is a matter of timing, as most deaths are among the very elderly or immuno-compromised, but if it's your grandparent, you probably don't see it that way.
The impact on our economy and government debt accumulation is also roughly comparable to our peers, despite being two months behind the US and UK vaccination programs.
Amid the new blame game, some media sources refer to our vaccine procurement as “botched”. Again, in perspective, was it really? We don’t have domestic supply (the blame for that goes back a long way and isn’t easy to pinpoint).
The government has committed to ensuring that doesn't happen to us in the next pandemic. We are indeed behind some other countries as a result. Given that, the best procurement strategy was to line up lots of suppliers, which we did. That way, we would be protected against one supplier failing or a vaccine proving to have problems or risks once widespread use. Canada hedged its bets.
There was an important delay in supply in February, without which the current surge might not be nearly as bad, but it was a supplier failure and out of our control. Perhaps we could have set delivery deadlines monthly instead of quarterly, but there is no certainty it would have made any difference. Recently, Moderna slowed shipments, but Pfizer sped theirs up, so the diversification strategy worked. As minor risk issues appeared with first AstraZeneca and next Johnson & Johnson, causing pauses and some vaccine hesitancy, we were fortunate that our strategy meant we weren’t dependent on either of those.
Vaccines are coming in spurts, causing some challenges for the Provinces to get them into people’s arms, but quantities are ramping up quickly. Now that concerns with AstraZeneca are behind us, we have lowered the age for vaccines to 40, and it will keep coming down rapidly. Among advanced Western countries, we now rank 3rd for doses per capita in countries with more than 30 million people. The only countries ahead of us are the two with much higher case and death rates, the USA and the UK.
Meanwhile, in BC, 17 people in a retirement home who had received one vaccine shot got COVID-19: none of them was hospitalized despite their advanced age. So, the government’s strategy of getting more people with one shot before doing the second jab was the right one because the main issue is not to overrun the hospital ICUs. That was the reason for the "flatten the curve" strategy and still is.
Maybe we are a bit inclined to see the positives, as the person who oversaw our vaccine acquisition strategy is Oakville's own MP and Minister of Procurement, Anita Anand. Still, when we listen to criticisms of Canada’s approach, we think it raises the question: what would you have done differently?
The pandemic has worn us all down, and we are having a terrible few weeks right now, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. Let’s keep perspective and be grateful for the backbreaking work health care professionals, front-line workers, and elected officials have done to ensure that COVID-19's impact on Canadians has been so much less than it has been on many of our peers.
If we are going to scratch our heads, perhaps it should be to wonder why our local shop can’t let us in one or two at a time. Yet big distribution warehouses for non-essential goods are open with people working together cheek by jowl and going home to multi-generational households? Or why vaccines weren’t directed to such environments much earlier? Or why are there so many restrictions on outdoor activities when the experts tell us they have not been the source of significant contagion, and we are desperate for such distractions to support our mental and physical well-being?
After a very effective and cooperative approach from the Province until recently, a failure to listen to its advisors and the science seems to have led the Ford government to panic and overreact irrationally, generating outrage and resentment. We knew the February vaccine gap would mean we couldn’t outrun the third wave, but apparently, our leaders didn’t believe the modelling until the hospitals started to overflow.
Let’s hope this incompetence-driven train wreck is short-lived and the country’s overall reasonably effective response to the virus can get back on track. Meanwhile, please do your part and get vaccinated.
