TRUMP WANNABE
Breakenridge: As covid cases rise, Kenney's keep calm and carry on advice is not much of a public health strategy
In relatively short order, Alberta’s daily COVID-19 case counts have jumped from the 100s to the 200s to the 400s and now into the 500s. At this rate, we may even crack the 600 threshold sometime this week.
© Provided by Calgary Herald Premier Jason Kenney speaks at the daily COVID-19 update with Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta’s chief medical officer of health, on March 13, 2020. If the premier wants to avoid a return to severe restrictions, then what's the alternative plan as covid cases rise? asks columnist Rob Breakenridge.
With this rate of doubling, Alberta could be well into quadruple digits before November is through. A prolonged trajectory of that sort of exponential growth would create a rather dire situation for our province.
For now, Premier Jason Kenney is urging Albertans, as he has done several times over the last seven months, to keep calm and carry on. But to follow the logic of the premier’s intended analogy, the resolute citizenry ought to then be able to trust that their elected government is dealing with the crisis.
Keeping calm and carrying on might be reasonable enough advice for folks, but it’s not much of a public health strategy. Rather than laying out a plan to deal with the sharp rise in cases, the premier and his spokespeople are more interested in articulating what they won’t do.
And that has meant a thorough thrashing indeed for the lockdown strawman over the last few weeks. No one is calling for a full lockdown and it’s not a binary choice between that and doing nothing. The premier’s reluctance to force businesses to close or even scale back is understandable, but that should be an incentive to find other solutions to our current predicament.
First of all, while it’s reasonable for the government to prioritize hospitalization numbers above the daily case count, one cannot totally separate the two. A certain percentage of active cases are going to be serious enough to require hospitalization and if the former is rising then the latter inevitably will, too. Greater community spread makes it that much more difficult to keep the virus away from individuals more prone to severe outcomes.
Furthermore, we shouldn’t be so naive as to think that it is only public health measures that negatively impact the economy. Rampant infection can create its own “lockdown” effect, and we’re doing no businesses any favours if we allow active cases to double every few weeks.
So if the premier believes there’s a path to avoiding a worsening of the situation that doesn’t involve any sort of temporary or partial business closures, now would be the time to act.
First and foremost, our test-trace-and-isolate system needs to be beefed up. We are not yet at the premier’s own stated target of 20,000 tests per day, which seems like an immediate and obvious priority. That gives us not only the flexibility to target testing where needed but can hopefully speed up the turnaround time on test results.
That, in turn, aids contact-tracing efforts. But with higher numbers of daily case counts, we’re going to need more boots on the ground when it comes to doing the actual contact-tracing work. One of the concerning trends in recent weeks has been the growing number of cases with unknown origin.
Those efforts would also be bolstered by Alberta finally switching over to the federal COVID Alert app. We were told in August that this transition would occur, but it’s now almost November and we are still waiting.
The 15-person limit on private gatherings announced Monday for Calgary and Edmonton makes sense. But the threshold for a region moving from “watch” to “enhanced” status should be clarified. It’s not clear, for example, why the voluntary restrictions implemented in Edmonton weren’t then applied in Calgary once cases started rising.
It would also go a long way for the premier himself to take the lead on this issue, rather than leaving it to the chief medical officer of health. It’s all well and good for Kenney to point to past successes on the COVID front or to share his thoughts on the impact of various lockdown measures, but none of that is actually helpful in the here and now.
“Afternoons with Rob Breakenridge” airs weekdays 12:30-3:30 p.m. on 770 CHQR rob.breakenridge@corusent.com Twitter: @RobBreakenridge
With this rate of doubling, Alberta could be well into quadruple digits before November is through. A prolonged trajectory of that sort of exponential growth would create a rather dire situation for our province.
For now, Premier Jason Kenney is urging Albertans, as he has done several times over the last seven months, to keep calm and carry on. But to follow the logic of the premier’s intended analogy, the resolute citizenry ought to then be able to trust that their elected government is dealing with the crisis.
Keeping calm and carrying on might be reasonable enough advice for folks, but it’s not much of a public health strategy. Rather than laying out a plan to deal with the sharp rise in cases, the premier and his spokespeople are more interested in articulating what they won’t do.
And that has meant a thorough thrashing indeed for the lockdown strawman over the last few weeks. No one is calling for a full lockdown and it’s not a binary choice between that and doing nothing. The premier’s reluctance to force businesses to close or even scale back is understandable, but that should be an incentive to find other solutions to our current predicament.
First of all, while it’s reasonable for the government to prioritize hospitalization numbers above the daily case count, one cannot totally separate the two. A certain percentage of active cases are going to be serious enough to require hospitalization and if the former is rising then the latter inevitably will, too. Greater community spread makes it that much more difficult to keep the virus away from individuals more prone to severe outcomes.
Furthermore, we shouldn’t be so naive as to think that it is only public health measures that negatively impact the economy. Rampant infection can create its own “lockdown” effect, and we’re doing no businesses any favours if we allow active cases to double every few weeks.
So if the premier believes there’s a path to avoiding a worsening of the situation that doesn’t involve any sort of temporary or partial business closures, now would be the time to act.
First and foremost, our test-trace-and-isolate system needs to be beefed up. We are not yet at the premier’s own stated target of 20,000 tests per day, which seems like an immediate and obvious priority. That gives us not only the flexibility to target testing where needed but can hopefully speed up the turnaround time on test results.
That, in turn, aids contact-tracing efforts. But with higher numbers of daily case counts, we’re going to need more boots on the ground when it comes to doing the actual contact-tracing work. One of the concerning trends in recent weeks has been the growing number of cases with unknown origin.
Those efforts would also be bolstered by Alberta finally switching over to the federal COVID Alert app. We were told in August that this transition would occur, but it’s now almost November and we are still waiting.
The 15-person limit on private gatherings announced Monday for Calgary and Edmonton makes sense. But the threshold for a region moving from “watch” to “enhanced” status should be clarified. It’s not clear, for example, why the voluntary restrictions implemented in Edmonton weren’t then applied in Calgary once cases started rising.
It would also go a long way for the premier himself to take the lead on this issue, rather than leaving it to the chief medical officer of health. It’s all well and good for Kenney to point to past successes on the COVID front or to share his thoughts on the impact of various lockdown measures, but none of that is actually helpful in the here and now.
“Afternoons with Rob Breakenridge” airs weekdays 12:30-3:30 p.m. on 770 CHQR rob.breakenridge@corusent.com Twitter: @RobBreakenridge
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