Designer-writer and committed citizen, the author is president of the governing board of an elementary school. She also taught literature at college and collaborates with the journal Quebec letters.
The house is on fire. Some 8,500 healthcare workers were sidelined on Wednesday, including about 5,500 because of COVID-positive or undergoing testing. Soon, it will be 10,000. Our government is talking wholeheartedly with them, but what has it done, in concrete terms, to protect them?
His solution to avoid the collapse of the health system: allow them to come to work while being positive and asymptomatic, by providing them, we hope, with N95 masks, more efficient than surgical masks, paper veils that “float” , all sides gaping, in front of the highly transmissible variant.
Will patients who work with these positive caregivers be notified? Will they also wear an N95? And the affected caregivers, who need rest to recover, how will they be in a few months? The long-term COVID variable should not be neglected …
We understand that Minister Dubé has come to this to avoid service disruptions. Even more than elsewhere, the Quebec health community has been decimated by Omicron; this is also the case for other essential services such as the police, we learned from Patrick Lagacé in Press. This solution is therefore far from ideal, but according to the actors in the field, it is a necessary evil. In an exceptional situation, an exceptional solution. What is scandalous is that everything has not been put in place to prevent health personnel from becoming infected since the start of the health crisis.
In 2020, even after the global N95 shortage was over, the government continued to reserve respirators for aerosol-generating medical interventions (IMGA). 30,000 health care workers, including several of those who requested more efficient masks, were infected during the second wave.
Last June, Quebec had almost twice as many caregivers infected as its neighbor Ontario. The Administrative Labor Court had to decide, in February 2021, for the government to equip workers in the hot zone with the N95s they had been asking for too long. Then nothing. Until we spoke, timidly, of expanding its use a week ago, when everything was already on fire.
The high cost of inaction
This choice to bring sick caregivers back to work (and the scale of the current disaster) is the consequence of another choice, which the government made in November and which is a reflection of its management of the pandemic since the beginning: that of believing and making believe, once again, that “everything is going to be fine”.
While bars and restaurants were allowed to operate at maximum capacity and masks were removed in high school classrooms, experts were warning the government and insisting that the third dose was urgent. While the Prime Minister continued to proudly trumpet that there was henceforth a “Minister of the Nordics”, Omicron was identified as a variant of concern by the WHO.
While Legault was selling us parties From Christmas to 25 then to 20, the variant had already made its way in several countries and its meteoric rise was beginning here too. While the UK reached 50,000 cases per day, Horacio Arruda reassured us of our hospital capacity.
While neighboring provinces handed out the rapid tests like candy, Quebec gave them drop-outs and lied about their ability to detect asymptomatic, while blaming the federal government when Quebec earlier dropped millions of tests. in warehouses.
The government managed by applying its usual recipe: by hoping that the wave passes by our side rather than by putting everything in place to prevent it. Except this time around, it’s the tsunami that many experts feared from the start that materialized. And it has repercussions on everyone, from caregivers who already have the language on the ground to parents who will have to do distance schooling; from residents of CHSLDs who are cut off from visits by family caregivers, in whole or in part, to patients who will have their operation delayed because of the load shedding.
To respond well to a pandemic, we must “hope for the best while preparing for the worst”. When will the government assume its responsibilities? It also consists in better educating the population, who believe they are falsely protected. There is a time and a place for cloth masks, wrote infectious disease expert Donald Vinh on Twitter on Wednesday: “never and in the trash”. Even that the government fails to communicate.
Several are calling for the resignation of Horacio Arruda; the enormities that he has peddled since the start of the crisis are not worthy of a public health director. Its non-recognition of aerosols as the main mode of transmission of COVID, an even more glaring reality with a highly contagious variant like Omicron, creates a harmful and lethal snowball effect. Just last week, he claimed that an ill-fitting N95 mask provided less protection than a surgical mask! The consequences of his incompetence are serious and manifold.
Supporting our healthcare workers means first and foremost protecting them. The government has failed in its task, but it can still change course. Minister Dubé had his head between his legs during the press briefing on December 28, and we can understand it: it is indeed difficult to overcome the wall we have hit when it is partly ourselves who have it. built.