Rather than help to die, long-term COVID patients need help to live!
These patients who never stop wanting to return to a normal life were abruptly torn from their dynamic and responsible life, which gave them the beneficial feeling of professional and personal accomplishment. After months of inability to resume this life (up to two years already, in many cases), the despair is great, very great even. Someone raised their voice in Ontario: “If it’s going to continue like this for the rest of my life, I would like to get medical assistance in dying! »
A petition having collected nearly 2000 signatures expired on May 15, at the National Assembly. As of the date of this letter, 62 days have since passed; we were told that the Minister of Health had 45 days to respond to the proposals and requests made in such a petition. The only advance that has been “announced” since then by Minister Christian Dubé was the promise that a regional network of clinics better versed in the treatment of long-term COVID-19 would be established. A necessary solution, of course, but of a medical nature only, it should be noted. Where are they, these clinics, while the morale of these “patients” is long exhausted?
But above all, some “considering that…” of the petition would have escaped the minister, who did not see the total professional and financial void experienced by these disabled people? Indeed, the government compensation forms for this long-term disability — not specifically “recognized” — do not exist to compensate, through a basic income, for the losses caused by this illness. Are also ignored all the advantages and benefits (years of seniority, collective insurance, protection of the workstation, contributions to the pension fund, etc.) lost by these very specific patients, whose social work standards and collective agreements obviously do not say nothing. For their recovery, these factors which corrode the morale of the sick are of equal importance to medical measures.
Minister Dubé, please take the turn of life support for these people with long-term COVID, so that – exhausted by their incapacitating situation – they do not ask you to provide them with life support. die. Those we love who suffer from this disease, we want them alive!