One Small Voice: Canada handled virus crisis better

by Lynn Mandaville

It’s a sad Palm Sunday in the United States.

Overnight, the death count rose by 1,300 human beings, most of them in New York.  The curve, as we erroneously call the rate of new cases of COVID-19, is still  a straight up ascent with no apparent flattening.

There is no good reason for us being in this situation.

I spoke to my sister, Nancy, this morning.  She lives in Ottawa, Ontario.  The COVID-19 story in Canada is quite different from ours.

When, in January, testing kits were available from WHO (the World Health Organization), Canada jumped at the opportunity to test a vast portion of their population.  The USA did not.  We held out to use our own tests, which were in very short supply, and continue to be arguably the biggest obstacle to gaining a foothold against the virus.

As cases of the virus showed the first hints of its virulence, Canada shut down its cities across the country.  There was none of the patchwork approach taken here in the US, where state governors were free to act or not act, without guidance, leadership or example from the president.

As a result, my sister says, Canada’s biggest city, Toronto, is experiencing an average of 25 deaths per day.  Only 25. And that’s also the highest per diem death rate since COVID-19 reared its ugly head north of the border.  Our death rate is now over 1,000 per day, and will continue at that rate nationwide, as the wave of exposure, infection and crisis moves through the states for the foreseeable future.

In addition, from the beginning of Canada’s shutdown, all unemployed persons began to receive 70% of their lost wages from the government.  Loans to small businesses were made available immediately through the government.  There was no confusion about on-line applications, no glut of applications through only major banking institutions, and no months-long lag time receiving funds.

But the most obvious factor to me, the one that forestalled or eliminated all that financial mitigation, was the fact that Canada got ahead of the virus from the get-go.  Because people didn’t get sick in uncontrollable numbers, there was no shortage of hospital beds, no shortage of ventilators, no overtaxing of medical workers.  Medical mitigation simply didn’t happen because people simply didn’t get sick.

What has become abundantly clear to me over the last week is that, as in so many other aspects of this current administration, there is just no clear, unified strategy to coping with this health crisis.

Though the U.S. had a federal emergency management agency in place, it has been allowed to deteriorate.  The emergency stockpile hasn’t been maintained, so those masks and ventilators held in reserve have rotted or fallen into disrepair.

The President didn’t activate the Defense Production Act when it could have made a difference.  He did it almost as an afterthought under public pressure to do so.  And then, once masks and ventilators were being produced, Steve Mnuchin decided to make those supplies available through the capitalist, for-profit supply chain in which corporations could reap revenue while states competed for those materials, bidding up prices to the detriment of state coffers.

Why didn’t Mnuchin turn those supplies over to the military quartermasters to distribute to the states in a manner consistent with needs?  Who knows better how to allocate and move materiel than our military, and to do it in the most cost-effective manner?

Why was Washington so slow to recognize and respond to COVID-19?

Why was there no true leadership coming from the President, the Senate, the House, and the state governors?

When leadership finally emerged, why were there so many divergent voices, instead a unison delivery of facts and strategy regarding the potential crisis and the measures needed uniformly across the board to prevent, or at least allay it?

I don’t have the answers to those questions.

What I do know is this:

• As Americans WE are ultimately responsible for the caliber of men and women who are sent to Washington to do our bidding.

• WE are responsible for their collective lack of logical thinking, for their level of selfishness and corruption, for their convoluted sense of priorities in serving their constituents.

• WE are the ones who determine what platform is in the best interest of the nation, to be enacted by those elected officials.

As we sit at home with time to ponder during this time of self-imposed isolation, it would do us well to make an assessment of what we want in our elected leaders.

Come November we will have the opportunity to keep “the good ones” and to replace those with whom we have become disenchanted.

Whether we vote in person, or whether a nation-wide mail-in ballot system is instituted, we need to make sure we speak up.

Our vote is still our best means of governing ourselves through the people in whom we place that sacred trust.