Mandryk: Gov’t needs to learn from past COVID-19 lessons
By Murray Mandryk
Political Columnist
We all get by now that living with COVID-19 will likely mean living with occasional waves and spikes.
We all likely get that means that just can’t shutdown the entire economy.
It would be almost impossible not to understand this point by now because this is what the government has been hammering home for months now.
This might not be what some of the less reasonable want to hear, but it only makes sense that we can’t perpetually lockdown the entire province. Even those provinces that have had more COVID-19 success — either recently or throughout this pandemic — haven’t done that.
But here’s the critically point: Very, very few people are seriously advocating lockdowns of any sort — not even the Medical Health Officers and other doctors who have twice written to Health Minister Paul Merriman and Premier Scott Moe advocating more stringent measures.
In fact, the last letter from the MHOs makes a point of saying this is precisely what they are not advocating.
Even the notion that the government has been spinning (and largely attributing to NDP Opposition leader Ryan Meili) than the MHOs are advocating a strict no-in-class school attendance for eligible non-vaccinated children desperately needs to be put in perspective.
For starters, while the MHO letter does suggest there should vaccine requirements for children attending class, the wording is far less than the government is portraying it to me.
In a reasonable world far removed politics this could be policy because it not unreasonable to ask for children to be vaccinated to attend schools. Most other provinces — even ones with conservative governments — do have policies requiring school-age children to be inoculated from mumps, measles and chicken pox before going to class and putting other kids at risk. (That we don’t have such a similar policy in Saskatchewan does not suggest we are innovative here.)
The notion we keep hearing from Moe and now Education Minister Dustin Duncan that the NDP would eagerly ban 27,000 unvaccinated kids (statistically speaking, it would more likely be 24,000 children) from getting an education is pretty much political hyperbole.
As was the case with the surge in vaccinations when this government finally got behind the notion in September of needing vaccine passports to attend public events (Remember: this is a government that initially balked at such an idea) it’s more than likely that many procrastinating parents would simply seen self-interested benefit of vaccinations.
But the problem all along — and especially since the re-opening of the province on July 11th — is that this government has thought it could skate by doing as little as possible.
Or at the very least, this has been a government terrified of offending those largely on the political right that advocate freedom.
And while it’s spun the notion that it has simply and carefully followed the expertise of the MHOs and Chief Medical Health Officer Dr. Saqib Shahab, we clearly know that just hasn’t been case.
That was already evident in the CMO letters’ made public at the time. It’s now evident in previously undisclosed documents obtain by StarPhoenix reporter Zak Vescera throne freedom-of-information requests.
The documents obtained show Merriman and this government were repeatedly warned about the “high likelihood” of a record-setting COVID-19 fall surge if more stringent measures weren’t taken.
The modelling that was wholeheartedly endorsed by Shahab as among the world predicted in June that the Delta variant would rapidly spread among the unvaccinated, flooding ICUs and potentially causing record deaths, Vescera reported.
Reinstating mandatory mask-wearing (lifted July 11th when the province reached its goal of 70 per cent of those eligible having at least one dose) would have reduce cases by 50 per cent, an August modelling document showed.
Following the best science is also practical, common sense.
It appears government needs to practice that as much as anyone else.