As Chris Selley illustrates, this was a clear failure for the various levels of government:
When Ontarians look back on the COVID-19 pandemic as the moment when their government finally ponied up the big bucks and fixed the province’s long-term care system, they will likely also wonder what the hell took so long. As appalled as everyone quite rightly is by the Canadian Forces’ report into the state of five long-term care homes that were in dire enough shape to require military intervention, we really shouldn’t be shocked. As the Ottawa Citizen in particular has reported in recent years, the system’s staffing levels were designed for a much less old, much less sick and much less Alzheimer’s-afflicted population than lives in them today — and it led to some terrible outcomes in normal times.
Perhaps it was easy to blame such incidents on individual villains: Ottawa support worker Jie Xiao, who was caught on video punching 89-year-old Georges Karam 11 times in the face; or Elizabeth Wettlaufer, one of Canada’s most prolific and yet somehow least-famous serial killers, who murdered at least eight senior citizens in long-term care homes during her red flag-festooned nursing career. Perhaps tales of society’s most vulnerable being forced to wallow in their own filth, or even just left alone in confusion and misery, are too much for the human mind to contemplate at length.
In any event, it only stood to reason that a virus as potent as the one that causes COVID-19 would exploit weak points in a long-term care system. Between wandering patients, fans circulating air throughout facilities and a lack of basic sterilization control, you would almost think these five facilities wanted the virus to spread. It’s a wretched understatement to say we can do better.
We shouldn’t fool ourselves, though: Long-term care homes will always be uniquely vulnerable. And as the economy reopens, it’s essential we keep focusing on them. It’s essential that we focus, period.
There is a tendency among media in Central Canada to treat “Canada’s COVID-19” outbreak as a single thing affecting all of society. It clearly isn’t. The numbers are all over the map. Quebec has reported by far the most cases and deaths: 5,655 and 480 per million population, respectively. Ontario is at roughly one-third of that: 1,778 cases per million and 144 deaths per million. At 1,569 cases per million, Alberta has a comparable number of cases to Ontario — but far fewer deaths, at just 31 per million. British Columbia has the same death rate as Alberta, but with only one-third as many cases. Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Newfoundland and New Brunswick have reported just 18 deaths between them. Quebec has nearly 30,000 active cases; Ontario has just over 6,000; Manitoba has 16.
