Will the Pandemic Shake Canadian Complacency?
Brandon Sun, March 1, 2021 - David McConkey
A COVID cliché is that
things will never be the same again. One thing that I hope changes
for the better: Canadian complacency. I am thinking of our two-part
complacency that revolves around the United States. The first part
is our unambitious assumption that we must rely on the expertise of
the U.S. The second part is our smug conceit that we are better than
Americans. Hey, my fellow Canadians! Time to stop being so
complacent! Out there is a big, wide world!
Canadian complacency was evident as soon as the pandemic got going.
We assumed that Canada would depend on American knowledge, such as
from their Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Then, as the pandemic
progressed, we assumed that the Canadian health-care system would
handle the pandemic better than the Americans could.
But a global pandemic is just that: global. And I hope that global
reality jolts us out of our complacency.
Soon into the pandemic, we should have sensed that something was
wrong with American expertise. Before reversing itself, the CDC at
first told the public that wearing masks was not recommended and
might even be harmful. We later learned that this advice was not to
protect the health of the public, but to protect mask supplies for
health-care workers. It also turned out that many American doctors
were worried about this dangerous initial messaging from the CDC,
but were hesitant to speak out.
The U.S. failed in other ways as well. In mid January 2020, the
World Health Organization posted basic information online about
making a test for the coronavirus. Scientists in Thailand had a test
ready in hours. The CDC did not have a test ready for 46 days.
Of course, the story of the pandemic is still being written. But we
have information now about how different countries fared in dealing
with the disease during the first year. An Australian think tank,
the Lowy Institute, published a COVID performance index on how 98 countries
did in terms of testing, cases and deaths.
How do countries of the world rank on this report card? New Zealand
is number 1. Here are the next best that make up the top ten:
Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, Cyprus, Rwanda, Iceland, Australia,
Latvia, Sri Lanka.
Wait a minute. Are those criteria the best way to evaluate
countries? What about other health, social and economic costs? What
about other factors – like geography, weather, culture, even luck –
that might play a role? Yes! Looking at such lists and asking such
questions is the point. Let’s aim to cultivate a skeptical,
wide-ranging, global perspective.
I will note again a book that I found helpful for its comprehensive
outlook, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact
of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. The author is American
physician and sociologist Nicholas Christakis. The book is on order
at the Brandon Public Library.
And we must look at our own response in order to do better next
time. For years, the Harper and Trudeau governments degraded our
pandemic readiness. In the year before the pandemic, the Trudeau
government shut down our pandemic monitoring program.
Provincial governments must be scrutinized, too. What kind of
pandemic planning had they done beforehand? And as some observers
are asking, when the pandemic began, did provinces throw out the
plans they already had and decide instead to just wing it?
And there will be much more to learn as more research is done. There
are also new developments like the emergence of variants of the
virus and the roll out of rapid-testing and vaccination programs.
And then there are anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories. In the U.S.,
only one-third of eligible nursing-home workers are choosing to get
vaccinated.
Let’s return to the Lowy list of country performances in dealing
with the pandemic. Here are the countries that number 11 to 20:
Estonia, Uruguay, Singapore, Malta, Togo, Malaysia, Finland, Norway,
Lithuania, South Korea. OK, that makes 20 countries that Canada
might learn from in dealing with a pandemic.
Oh, by the way, where is Canada on the list of pandemic performance?
We are 61. Yes, we should be humbled, but we can be resolved to
learn and to do better in the future. But we must avoid taking the
lazy approach by simply comparing ourselves with the United States.
To do better than the Americans sets the bar way too low. Where does
the U.S. rank? The U.S. is at 94, fifth from the bottom.
The post-pandemic time could be a vibrant one of learning and
discovery. We Canadians don’t have to be complacent. We don’t have
to look only at the U.S. We have a whole wide world to explore.
See also:
Here's an Idea: Raise Our Taxes to Pay for Pandemic
Our Leaders Must Tell Us the Truth About the Pandemic
A Local Journal of the 1918 Flu
The Role for Today’s Armchair Epidemiologists
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