I got COVID and the casual response I received shows we haven’t learned lessons from the pandemic

Article Published May 7, 2024 By Andrew Phillips
Article Source: Canada needs to study and learn from its pandemic response (thestar.com)

So far there hasn’t been a systematic look at how Canada responded to the pandemic and if it’s left up to governments alone there won’t be one.

I did a decidedly retro thing last week. I came down with COVID-19.

I quickly learned that hardly anyone takes it seriously anymore. The test kits I still had around expired in March but when I asked my helpful local pharmacy for more they said their supply had expired, too. “The government doesn’t give us new ones,” they said.

Still, the tests showed positive so I also asked them for Paxlovid, the drug that’s supposed to ease COVID symptoms if you take it right away. Their Paxlovid supply had expired, too — in March of 2023 — and the government apparently doesn’t provide fresh doses of that, either. “It should be OK,” they said helpfully.

We should be thankful, I suppose, for this casual approach. After all, it wasn’t long ago that COVID had turned everything upside down, killing 59,000 Canadians and costing us hundreds of billions of dollars.

How wonderful that vaccines have tamed this disease and made it a routine viral illness that most people don’t even bother to test for.

But COVID is still with us, as I learned the hard way. There were 1,606 new cases reported in Canada during the week ending April 30 — a number that’s undoubtedly way low given most people with symptoms either don’t test or don’t report a positive test.

In the same week 47 deaths across Canada from COVID were reported — almost seven per day. And then there’s the toll of long COVID, which lingers for weeks or months. None of this has convinced most people to keep up with their COVID shots. Only 20 per cent of people are fully vaccinated, the federal government reported in March.

But at least we’ve learned the key lessons of the pandemic — haven’t we? Surely we wouldn’t go through such a collective trauma and fail to figure out what went right and what needs to be fixed before the next crisis strikes (experts are already sounding an alarm over the H5N1 bird flu)?

Well, not really. Despite the Trudeau government’s promise of a “full investigation” of how government handled COVID at the “appropriate time,” the time was never appropriate. So far there hasn’t been a systematic look at how Canada responded to the pandemic and if it’s left up to governments alone there won’t be one. There’s certainly no appetite for a full-blown public inquiry that would inevitably turn into partisan point-scoring at the government’s expense.

But that doesn’t change the overwhelming public interest in drawing lessons for the future. You could begin by just figuring out how much governments spent on fighting COVID and its fallout. The C.D. Howe Institute tried to find that out last year and concluded that no one knows.

There are basic state-of-preparedness questions, such as whether Canada really will be able to produce vaccines domestically by next year, as promised, and whether public health agencies are properly resourced and organized for the next time.

And there are equally vital questions about the trade-offs involved when governments go all-out to fight a pandemic, as they did in 2020-21. To take a particularly controversial example — was it right to shut down schools for months on end in an attempt to stop the spread?

We now have solid evidence showing that was an overreaction. A study at McMaster University concluded that closing schools had “not much impact” on transmission because young kids rarely spread the disease. U.S. studies have found the same thing. Let’s not make that mistake again.

And what about the toll of undiagnosed illnesses caused by making COVID the overwhelming priority? We have little hard data on that, but it’s important to figure out the cost of over-reacting to one threat while neglecting others.

Two think-tanks, the Institute for Research on Public Policy and the Institute on Governance, recently called for a “comprehensive examination” of Canada’s response to COVID. They suggest an expert panel named by the federal and provincial governments. Right now, they say, Canada has “only a fragmented, partial picture” of how things worked.

That’s the least that should be done. Let’s learn the lessons before it’s too late.