A newborn with a fever waited five hours to be seen by an emergency physician near Toronto.
Patients were surrounded by garbage and urine as they waited 18 to 20 hours for care at a hospital in Fredericton.
And in Alberta, Red Deer’s long-beleaguered hospital was forced to hang tarps to create makeshift treatment spaces.
Those headlines come from different hospitals and different provinces. But they all point to the same grim problem: Emergency rooms are overflowing while an array of respiratory illnesses — COVID-19 included — keep circulating. And it’s happening against a backdrop of behind-the-scenes backlogs that turn front-line ERs into dangerous choke points.
The numbers are staggering. More than 10,000 people are in hospital at once across B.C., the most the province has ever seen, while Quebec grapples with the highest level of patients in its emergency rooms in five years.
In Ottawa, the Queensway Carleton Hospital recently said it was operating at 115 per cent occupancy. By midweek, most Montreal emergency rooms were above full capacity, with some operating at roughly 200 per cent.
There’s no uptake. Conservatives in both countries have politicized science and vaccine denial, and efforts to force vaccines at they did before to protect the healthcare system were obstructed.
I can get a free flu shot and a free COVID vax at a local pharmacy very close to me; or the dozen others in close proximity. It’s a very effective move to put vaccines in the hands of those who want them but not everyone wants them and we need to address why those people who can get vaxed but aren’t are still afforded the rest of the perqs of membership in society once they break the social contract.
They can roll a nurse in a van full of vax doses; but if no one shows up because some hypocrite convinced them not to, because it’s politically helpful to kill the healthcare system and force in an American system, then it’s not effective to roll that van.
Arrest the people trying to dismantle our healthcare system for a mercenary one - so they can get kickbacks and retire to Cabo - and tax the mercenary clinics to hell and close the system so it works again. Even then it’ll take yeeeeears to get back righted but with hope and decent archiving we can leave this whole shitfest in a record for the next generation when some orange-faced realtor-scumbag tries the same shit again.
There’s some deep irony that the vaccine mandate was introduced almost 200 years ago in the US by a governor that would run under the National Republican party for the subsequent election. By politicizing and empowering vaccine denial, they are attacking a centenary policy, which is against the philosophy of conservatism (“commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation.” according to Google).