Friday March 12, 2021 | VICTORIA, BC
ANALYSIS | by Mary P Brooke, B.Sc., Editor | Island Social Trends
The daily COVID test-positive count today Friday March 12 –– officially one year and one day into the COVID-19 pandemic — is stubbornly high at 648. That’s the highest daily case count in two months. There’s also a very high count of active cases at 5,070.
Even though there were no deaths in today’s BC Centre for Disease Control COVID statistics (most of which have been in long-term care where the health of most residents is frail to begin with) which a tribute to the power of the new mRNA vaccine technology, the resistance to public health measures is what clearly shows in the high daily cases.
Vaccination of mostly elders and frontline health care workers has thankfully plummeted the death count, but the rest of society if reeling.
Take a look at daily case counts this month so far:
- March 1: 438
- March 2: 438
- March 3: 542
- March 4: 564
- March 5: 634
- March 6: 545
- March 7: 532
- March 8: 385 (the Sunday-Monday tally is usually lower as people probably prefer to stay home on Sunday)
- March 9: 550
- March 10: 531
- March 11: 569
- March 12: 648
People are getting back to work, exploring their social options again, and generally responding as people do — enough is enough.
Some of that shows in the count of 9,155 people under active health monitoring, public health authorities have one of the highest tallies of people known to be exposed to the virus.
Most of us are experiencing the realities … the impacts of the pandemic on social and economic aspects of our lives have gone on too long, things are crumbling.
Public health leadership likely has interpreted the stubborn daily case counts just as the rest of us have — enough is enough. This week in her two live media briefings Provincial Health Officer Dr Bonnie Henry indicated that things will start opening up.
Yesterday Dr Henry said people can now gather outside in groups of up to 10 people, and people can meet outdoors with a friend for coffee. She readily admitted that this number is ‘not science’ but based almost entirely on how effectively any needed contact tracing could be done.
Dr Henry also said that sports opportunities will open up, especially for youth. Today there was an announcement that the BC Hockey League can have a short tight season starting in April (with five pod cities in the BC Lower Mainland) as a way to get that sector up and running again.
While the mental health impacts of what has effectively been a social lockdown are already well known and documented as a problem going forward (as people live through the impacts and try to find modes of recovery), it’s possible that a backlash over how restrictions on the population will rise up with some degree of force in various social ways.
Clearly the approach to keep people home was to reduce interaction as a way to prevent viral spread and to keep the impact on the acute-care hospital system under control.
While of course frontline health-care workers have taken the brunt of the direct contact with the COVID-19 virus, the shutting down of surgeries early in the pandemic last spring was overkill and a misjudgement of how COVID would impact BC (officials were looking at how countries like Italy were affected, where the communal living situation is more crowded than in BC, where the population of elderly is much higher by comparison, and levels of industrial pollution — leading to predisposed lung vulnerability — are much higher than here).
Health Minister Adrian Dix’s surgical renewal plan (launched in mid-May 2020) did open up surgeries again, and he has touted high surgical counts in the months that followed. But that also overloaded the already-stressed health care professionals and their support teams. While no one wishes it so, the overload of a now over a year of unusual and extraordinary pressures on the health care system could very well be on the brink of a collapse. That would include attrition and loss of workers across the sector, whether by choice or illness, as noted by the BC Nurses Union months ago.
