Globe editorial: The unlearned lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic – The Globe and Mail

Four years ago this week, there was only one subject on Canadians minds: the incipient COVID-19 pandemic. Schools and businesses were locked down in most of the country. The death count was appalling: close to 1,900 in the first full week of the month. In all, about 4,300 Canadians would die that May with far more brutal waves of infection and death to come.

The story is much different today. Thanks to the rapid development, approval and delivery of vaccines an amazing human accomplishment that isnt celebrated enough COVID-19 has been brought to heel and is now largely seen as just one more viral disease, like the flu or common cold. The availability of home testing kits means most people who become infected by the latest variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus can manage the disease at home, and never trouble the health care system.

Thats good, but it hides the troubling fact that it is difficult to discern coherent policies at any level of government for continuing the fight against COVID-19, for dealing with its long-term effects, or for preparing for another pandemic.

First and foremost, the pandemic is still going on. While infection rates are stable, there were still 3,320 new cases and 94 deaths from April 7 to April 20, according to federal data. Thats more than six deaths a day. And the number of cases is undercounted, given that many people wont bother to report a positive home test to the government.

As well, there is a continuing long COVID crisis in Canada, in which symptoms sometimes debilitating ones last months or even years. A Statistics Canada report from last December found that 2.1 million people were experiencing long COVID symptoms as of June, 2023.

Meanwhile, vaccination rates have plunged. Barely one in five people had received the recommended dose for their age group and health status as of the end of February, according to federal data. Even the rates for the vulnerable elderly have fallen. Only 55 per cent of people aged 70-79, and 61 per cent of those over 80, have had the recommended dose.

Equally concerning is that there has never been a public inquiry into the handling of the crisis. That means the public can have little confidence that, in a future epidemic or pandemic, there wont be a repeat of Ontarios infamous snafu, where the provincial government put millions of dollars of personal protection equipment into a warehouse after the 2003 SARS epidemic in Toronto, and then let the contents expire without being replaced, contributing to a shortage of PPE in the COVID crisis.

Ottawa has signed a 10-year agreement with a Montreal company to supply N95 respirators and surgical masks, but that hardly counts as a comprehensive plan to build a national stockpile of PPE available to every province.

On the vaccine-supply front, Moderna, one of the developers of the mRNA COVID vaccine, is opening a plant in Montreal this year that will provide Ottawa with a minimum of 30 million doses a year. The facility will also research emerging viruses and develop new vaccines.

But that bit of good news cant hide the fact that there is no joint federal-provincial planning for handling the next pandemic. Its more accurate to say the provinces and Ottawa are operating in their own silos, making little apparent effort to co-operate on a national scale and instead looking after partisan political concerns.

This may well be the most lasting and damaging legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada: the politicization of science and public-health measures. Where most Canadians feel that governments did what they had to do in a fast-moving crisis, some saw the lockdowns and vaccine mandates as infringements of basic rights that silenced scientific inquiry and public debate.

This space has long argued that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau proposed vaccine mandates on truckers as a wedge issue in the 2021 election. The illegal 2022 trucker occupation in Ottawa, and the Trudeau governments use of the Emergencies Act to end it something a court has since ruled was unjustified was the climax of that tension.

The handling of the COVID-19 crisis remains a bitterly divisive issue in Canada, but no politician at any level seems interested in reconciling the different sides. That, along with the collapse of an effective vaccination strategy and the lack of future-proofing, demonstrate that Canadians and their leaders arent heeding the lessons of the pandemic.

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Globe editorial: The unlearned lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic - The Globe and Mail