Designer-editor and committed citizen, the author is president of the governing board of an elementary school. She also taught literature at CEGEP and contributes to the magazine Quebec letters.
This fifth wave marks a turning point in the Legault government’s crisis management. Overwhelmed by Omicron, our leaders have decided that the time has come to “live with the virus”, despite a healthcare system that has reached its breaking point. But, rather than act to mitigate transmission and protect the most vulnerable people other than by vaccination alone, our political authorities seem to have opted for a nebulous cocktail of inaction and opacity.
The break began last December. Facing overloaded screening infrastructures, the Legault-Arruda-Dubé trio restricts access to PCR tests and asks the population to turn to rapid tests, after having dropped seven million in warehouses for months. Now that only about half of the 45,000 daily PCR tests are being used, access is not being expanded. (At least the rapid test self-reporting platform has finally been rolled out…)
Shortly before, in the midst of the rise of Omicron, the government had terminated funding for the CentrEau-COVID project. Until December 17, this was used to detect outbreaks in the sewage of a population before the increase in the positivity rate of PCR tests. Now that the view of the exact number of cases is reduced, the government could refinance this inexpensive tool in order to obtain a more accurate picture of the health situation and to see what is coming. However, nothing moves.
Added to this is the return to school, which requires that we “self-manage” with the help of a flowchart worthy of the “house that drives you crazy”. We gave up tracking. Parents are no longer notified if the coronavirus is circulating in a classroom. We no longer count cases (we now count absences twice a week). Classes are no longer closed unless more than 60% of students are absent. Setting up a case reporting platform by school would be possible, COVID Écoles Québec did it — on a voluntary basis. But our leaders prefer to leave the population in the dark.
Alongside this opaque veil that it weaves to cover the epidemiological situation, Quebec is sketching out a radical plan which provides for “no longer making every effort to prevent the intrusion of the virus into the hospital and accepting the risks”. This, while hospital-acquired COVID infections are on the rise, cancer operations are postponed and exhausted health personnel are still subject to a ministerial order…
The social fabric is fraying
Like barbecue pork, which it will soon be possible to eat in sandwiches at restaurants with hickory sauce please, the social fabric is fraying. To have a Prime Minister who answers himself that ” we have to accept maybe more deaths when a journalist asks him what “living with the virus” entails encourages the rule of every man for himself. For a bit he would tell us bluntly that going to eat oysters with friends, as before, can only be done at the expense of more human lives… Enough to cut the appetite of any empathetic person. We nevertheless open everything, without implementing measures adapted to an airborne virus, without thinking of the most vulnerable people, in particular immunosuppressed, for whom the pandemic is a long risky day of which they do not see the end… The population is tired, fine. I’m in. But navel-gazing seems to take more precedence over solidarity every day.
Of course, restaurateurs also have families to support and mental health to preserve. However, we are once again opting for deconfinement galore, by sector of activity, without listening to the engineers, without taking into account the built environment and the level of risk associated with each environment. This new attempt would be less likely to fail if we stopped believing that COVID is not transmitted when we eat in public, seated, not far from a steamy window which betrays the lack of outside air intake…
If we want to put an end to this trying Sisyphean waltz of openings and closings, we will soon have to look reality in the face and collectively give ourselves the means to live with a virus that is transmitted through the air. This involves mitigating transmission and allowing people to make informed choices. Devices exist; some, like HEPA filter air purifiers, can be set up quickly. In Japan, people can choose their restaurant according to the rate of CO2, which is public. But our society, distinct isn’t it, resists these technological tools which would increase our chances of getting out of it. In 1997, at Les Éboulements, 47 people lost their lives after their bus plunged into a ravine. A tragedy that led to rapid action on the part of the Ministry of Transport: the configuration of the large coast has been corrected. No one has died there.
Since the start of 2022, 1,490 people have died from the coronavirus in Quebec; 32 buses that plunged into the COVID ravine. But we don’t seem to see them anymore. “Deaths”, “statistics”. These people were certainly elderly or suffered from comorbidities, but without the coronavirus in their path, they would still be alive today. Calling them “collateral damage” breeds with ageism and ableism. When our Prime Minister invites us to live with the virus without deploying the necessary tools, he encourages division and flouts solidarity. It implicitly tells us that not all lives are created equal.
We can’t wait for the media to show us more of the faces of the load shedding, of the lives taken away, of the loved ones who mourn them… And we can’t wait for us to recover a vision of the situation and judge the risk thanks to complete, up-to-date data. Because, for now, we are being asked to live with the virus — and, for some, to die — blindfolded.