Toronto calls in the superheroes to help with vaccinating young children against COVID-19, while the rest of the country turns away from those who offer to do it.
The first major Canadian outbreak of COVID-19 is about to hit the country. We all know and are well aware of the threat it poses. Every time a new case is reported, people are worried — and rightly so. The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases jumped by nearly 900 per day in the week before last weekend, to more than 3,000, prompting the federal government to declare a national emergency. But even if the virus were to infect every Canadian — the federal government’s estimate is one in a hundred — the danger is severe. It’s a pandemic. And the fact that it’s happening in a country with high rates of chronic disease, low rates of immunization and a population of young children means that our children are among the most at risk.
For weeks, it’s been clear that Canada has failed to adequately plan for the response to COVID-19. Most Canadians — and even elected officials — are baffled by what happened. The federal government, the provinces and the territories all have their own ways of addressing the pandemic. But none of them has put in the same kind of effort to ensure that Canadians are prepared for it. As a result, there’s a widespread sense among people that we’ve made it to the end of the curve but the problem is that we’re still at the beginning.
But the Canadian government’s track record in fighting and surviving epidemics is nothing to be ashamed of. Canadians survived and dealt with epidemics of Spanish flu, tuberculosis, cholera, the 1918 flu pandemic and SARS. That didn’t keep the federal government from spending more than $6 billion on the 2009 flu vaccine — and still, the country is considered one of the worst prepared