Ontario's population is approximately 14.5 million, and there are about 500 hospitals scattered across the province. When lockdown and social distancing measures were introduced back in mid March of this year the reason was clear, our underfunded and overburdened hosptials would not be able to handle the number of Covid patients that computer modeling suggested were going to happen.
The computer modeling was wrong. There are currently only 749 patients being treated for Covid-19 in this entire province.
Even with social distancing and all the rest (so called Non-Pharmeceutical Interventions or NPIs for short) critical care space was supposed to be exceeded about eight times over. The reason the modeling was wrong is that it was predicated on a mortality rate of about 4.5%, meaning that for every 100 people getting infected with the novel coronavirus 4 to 5 would be dying.
There is no credible science suggesting the mortality rate is that high, not even close. The CDC, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, USC and Oxford are all now citing figures of less than 1%, some as low as just .1 or .2%.
Now, just to be clear, I'm talking about patients, not cases.
An old English Lit professor of mine was a stickler for "defining terms". So I feel compelled to provide the defintition for the word "patient". The Oxford dictionary defines a patient as: A person who is receiving medical treatment. Merriam Webster says it's: An individual awaiting or under medical care or treatment.
So it's accurate to say that every Covid patient is a case, but not every Covid case is a patient. Someone isolating at home with mild or zero symptoms is no more a patient than someone staying home with a cold. For ~99% of the population, the immune system is able to deal with Covid and no treatment is needed.
749 patients is not a crisis. If it is then we have a crisis every flu season. In 2018 StatsCan reports 8,511 Canadians died of the flu, including many children. Yet we've never done anything close to what's being done now. I guess the lives of young children have never mattered.
I realize that many are still terrified because of all the media messaging about the "deadly coronavirus". It reminds me of the way people were scared into supporting George Bush's Persian Gulf war because of the threat from Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction, or WMD for short.
Just like that disastorous war and all the casulaties it brought, this war against the mostly benign coronavirus has lots of casualites. And big winners too, let's not forget those that are profitting. Haliburton made out incredibly well from that Persian Gulf war, and the Amazons, Wal-Marts and Loblaws of the world are raking it in now thanks to emergency measures shutting down their small independent competitors.
Our response is devastating the very people that the progressive left used to advocate for: I'm talking about children, the poor and marginalized, those with mental health and dependency issues. We made Haliburton shareholders rich because as a society we were scared beyond the capacity for rationale thought in the run up to the Persian Gulf War. And the same thing has happened again with the mostly benign coronavirus, we're making the rich richer and the poor ever poorer.
Time to correct the mistake, past time.
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