The novel coronavirus is under control and the curve is being flattened … except where it isn’t.
And the plan to re-open Saskatchewan is proceeding in a sensible, methodical way … except where that’s not happening.
If COVID-19 developments of the past week have sounded like an incomprehensible riddle, it’s likely because it’s been just that.
Really, there’s only one or two things predicted that have actually come to fruition:
As our politicians suggested would happen, there have been setbacks. And as one would think would happen in a crisis of unprecedented nature and proportion, some mistakes were inevitable.
So let’s look at what’s happened in the past week ... and maybe what’s worked and what hasn’t.
Yes, Premier Scott Moe and doctors with Ministry of Health and the Saskatchewan Health Authority are right that the virus is mostly under control. We have had 487 cases as of the writing of this column, but only 171 are considered active. In what government classifies as southern and central rural Saskatchewan, there are zero active cases and less than 20 cases in the two major cities.
The problem is the “north” (specifically, an outbreak in the Lloydminster hospital) and the “far north” (specifically, La Loche 500 kilometres north of Saskatoon) that now account for 37 and 114, respectively, of those 171 active cases right now.
The La Loche situation is exceptional, in that it was brought into the community by returning oilsands workers from Alberta’s Kearl Lake and spread like wildfire through the impoverish community with a severe housing shortage where people live in close quarters.
While government officials were quick to point out this is an isolated outbreak, they were equally quick to point out such outbreaks brought in from the outside could happen in most any community (as was the case in in Lloydminster) and we need to be vigilant as a result.
The government said it was doing its part by excluding Lloydminster and the north from last week’s first phase of the Re-Open, Saskatchewan Plan.
It wasn’t exactly consistent with the overall message that now is a good time to start the provincewide re-opening process. But, as early suggested, virtually nothing in the situation we are now in lends itself to consistency.
So the Saskatchewan Party government forged ahead with the re-opening of dental, optometric and chiropractic services last week, notwithstanding the obvious difficulty of providing such procedures while keeping a safe social distance.
This was accompanied by allowing golfing, fishing and camping that can be more easily achieve social distancing. Again, some would argue that this is a misplacement of priorities. But maybe it’s a reflection of how tough it is to provide consistent policy, leaving plenty of opportunities for the second-guessers to complain how we are either proceeding too fast or too slow.
The only solution is to try and fix such problems as they arise, which seems to be what the SHA did last week when it unveiled its schedule to return to other medical procedures.
That begins on May 19 with procedures ranging from cataracts to hysterectomies to cochlear and thoracic procedures to MRIs, CTs, X-rays and ultrasounds, to breast biopsies to orthotics and prosthetics to chronic disease support to baby and prenatal care to home care and public health nursing, immunizations, public heath inspections, dialysis and mental health and addiction services including small group therapy.
Why some of these procedures didn’t happen earlier has a lot to do with could realistic be done and maybe what government and health experts got right and wrong.
There have been mistakes and there have been the need to make exceptions.
But what this whole COVID-19 crisis has really shown us we all need to adapt, to be patient to simply figure things out as we go.
