A rchive Date
[ 27-05-2021 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-to-emerge-or-not-to-emerge-that-is-the-question-what-is-the-lockdown-exit-plan
To emerge or not to emerge. That is the question. What is the lockdown exit plan?
Canadians have had their fill. The nation needs to know, with some real numbers, when it can hope to crawl out from under this pall
Rex Murphy May 26, 2021
I think you could travel from Twillingate to Tuktoyaktuk and down again to the last, remote inlet on Vancouver Island and not find a single person who thinks this pandemic, first identified in Wuhan, but which I apparently shouldn’t call the Wuhan virus, has been handled well. You would likewise be greatly challenged to find anybody who would rate the leadership during this period as anything other than as crawling at snail acceleration towards mediocrity.
Which leader - federal or provincial, government or opposition - stands out in the reader’s mind as a true compass in this dire time? Who has offered genuine reassurance and clear, consistent guidance?
Our present plight during this lamentable COVID onslaught unerringly brings to mind the Israelites of long ago and their tormented progress for over 40 years in the desert. In Canada’s case, we’re minus Moses.
Two weeks to flatten the curve. Words to inscribe on our coin currency in the days to come, as signalling the emptiness of every projection and promise dealing with COVID-19 from the beginning.
If we had very large coins, I would propose inscribing that recent empty vaunt (appalling in its witlessness and cheerleading puerility) “one-dose summer, two-dose fall” - a slogan that would embarrass a game show host.
I am not going to go over what has been gone over so often already: the list of mixed messages; the back and forth on banning flights; the arbitrary deployment of police; the absolute and near-criminal mismanagement of the one essential, vaccines; the callous incompetence in treating the aged. To particularize in full, specific detail the variations in advice, the different times and practices of every province, the shoddy rollout of what vaccines Canada - so far back of other less endowed countries - did manage to get so far, would take volumes.
Who is keeping track of the second-tier crises arising directly out of the first tier? All those people who have been on standby for the treatment of serious illness, all those who during the past year and a half have been waiting for treatments and surgery - where is the inventory, the accounting for the medical crises that are not of COVID origin but are the outgrowth of the full fixation on COVID?
Cataracts, to take one example, do not remove themselves. Knees do not operate on themselves. And there are those with graver conditions awaiting surgery, caught in some terrible limbo of anxiety and fear. After COVID, just as an observation, we going to have to tune down the hymns to Canada’s abstruse boast that it has the best health-care system in the Western world.
There also are illnesses, many illnesses, that are not of the body. The weight of responsibility, the worry and stress felt by many trying to manage some employment, run some business, all the while under these endless lockdowns, has been enormous. Is there such a thing as collective trauma? If there is, Canada is going through one right now, or will be. When the veil really lifts, and we see how much the country has been injured, economically, financially and psychologically, we will face a common trauma, the greatest since the end of the Second World War.
The news is, every day, a snowfall of numbers and news anchors and reporters chirping out meaningless cautions everyone has heard every day in the 18 months just past. Here’s a bulletin: people are not listening or watching these endlessly repetitive, one day indistinguishable from the next, daily litanies.
How about some targets? Some dates that have meaning - as vehemently opposed to targets that fade as soon as the day for one comes due? How about, for once, a consistent statement on vaccines? Do we wear masks after full vaccination - if in Canada we ever reach that magical moment? Can we have a statement about store openings that last at least a week? How about telling the police to go after street protests in the same way they go after non-protests when people gather at a beach or in a park?
To emerge or not to emerge. That is the question. What is the exit from lockdown?
Is the past year and a half just a down payment on the eventual length of the lockdown?
How about the leader of the country giving us, not some dubious figures on vaccines, but an overview of COVID, its impact on the country, medically and economically. Perhaps even supplying some measure of assurance and inspiration?
How about some targets? Some dates that have meaning
Most Canadians, in my judgment, have had their fill. They are giddy with meaningless numbers. They are exhausted with the curtailment of daily and social life. They do not believe provincial or national leaders have shown that they - the leaders - know how to handle this moment. They believe that the leaders, in their domain, are more anxious and confused even than they. They have gone beyond tiredness, their compliance is half-hearted at the very best. They are untrusting of a majority of the “guidance” they have received and are receiving.
The response has been so confused, so contradictory in so many areas, it cannot continue. It has been rife with hypocrisy, treating one set of the population - those depending on an open society for their jobs, or their businesses - differently from those who are in government, civil service or teaching. COVID has a two-tier impact, and the experiences of the protected set are far, far less onerous than those of the unprotected set.
We need some definitive statements from our leaders, and the nation needs to know, with some real numbers, when it can hope to crawl out from under this pall, and set its economic engines running again. Its people need to know when their siege with its attendant miseries, the overall claustrophobia it has induced, will end.
And if anyone thinks we should have a national election in the midst of a botched COVID response, and before it has been mastered, they should be placed on an ice flow and left to drift.
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