Bruce Arthur: Crisis? Ontario’s COVID-19 response is just adequate enough to say that others are worse

“In fact, Ontario is not in a crisis right now. You want to speak about who is in crisis? Have you taken a look at Alberta, where they’re doubling up patients in intensive care units? We’re not doing that in Ontario.” — Christine Elliott, Ontario minister of health, this week.

You see, Ontario is not in a crisis, because Ontario is not jamming two people to a room in the ICU. Nor is Ontario rationing oxygen, unlike some provinces we could name. Yes, Alberta is currently being run by Jason Kenney’s pure, uncut conservatism: you have the personal freedom to infect yourself and others, and perhaps to get sick and die. Ontario has those instincts — the recent framework was the best example, — but for various reasons, this province plays closer to the middle. So Ontario, unlike Alberta is not in crisis.

By extension, York Region must not be in crisis. Friday to put York into lockdown, despite the fact that and test positivity than Toronto did when it was put into lockdown two weeks ago. York begged to avoid the province’s grey zone then, and again now: its local medical officer of health, Dr. Karim Kurji, signed the letter.

York still has hospital capacity, you see. Public health is not overwhelmed yet. Therefore, York is not in crisis. Maybe it gets locked down Monday, maybe not. Soon places like Waterloo, Hamilton, Windsor and Durham may not be in crisis, in a similar way.

What about schools? Schools are not in crisis. The minister of education, Stephen Lecce, keeps telling us that 99.9 per cent of children in school are COVID-free. Of course, then came asymptomatic testing at Thorncliffe Public School in East York, driven by Michael Garron Hospital and supported by the province. It found , which the province and even Toronto Public Health downplayed given the prevalence of in the neighbourhood.

Then three teachers said they were walking off the job, and now the school is closed. The City of Toronto for schools and daycares: runny noses will require a COVID test again to return to school; the siblings of sick kids will have to be kept home, too.

Those conditions had been changed at the beginning of October, when the province started trying to curb testing everywhere it could because the backlog was crippling the system, and schools were part of that. The province had back in the spring in time for September, as part of Ontario’s puzzling failure until the fall was already underway.

More schools will be tested, now: In East York, Scarborough, North York, York Region. We are about to find out whether we have been missing cases in schools for two months, and what that means. Maybe it means closing schools.

But for now, schools are not in crisis.

The premier was not available to weigh in Friday because the province has also struck a vaccine distribution task force, which includes nobody from public health, or geriatric medicine — is long-term care, where 124 people have died in the last two weeks and 310 since Halloween, in crisis? — or family medicine, or nursing, but does include former Toronto police chief Mark Saunders, for some reason. Still, a task force is important.

“I’m going to work my hardest to ensure we have a data-driven and equitable approach to vaccination,” says Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Toronto, who is on the task force. “We need to hear voices from disproportionately impacted communities, including Indigenous, South Asian, Black and impoverished communities. Ultimately, for any vaccine program to be a success we need meaningful community engagement, and stellar communication that is transparent and honest.”

All that, at an Ontario-wide level, would be a commendable first. Meanwhile, as reported by the Star’s Jennifer Yang and Kate Allen, Ontario’s poorest, most vulnerable, most racialized people are , just as they .

And still, the province declines to extend paid sick leave or reintroduce an eviction ban. Ontario’s eviction ban , as the second wave was already underway. Is that a crisis?

And then there are the hospitals. This is a hyperlocalized disease, but the system is straining as patients are shuttled like it’s a shell game, and staff are verging on burnout and shortages.

“(The hospital system is) transferring ICU patients every day for a bed, but now we’re also transferring ward patients, and this is new,” says Dr. Michael Warner, the head of critical care at Michael Garron Hospital. “I think public health and political decisions to some degree have been made based on the presumption that the health-care system would be there at the end of the day as the ultimate safety net. And that we could accept some mistakes or some reactive responses because the health-care system would be there, as it has been.

“But as we’ve been told all along, hospitalizations are lagging indicators, and those lagging indicators are trying to scream that things are not OK. And unless we provide support for people, paid sick days, surveillance testing in schools, which should be mandatory in high-risk areas, and (isolation), a vaccine will not be here in time to bridge that gap.”

Ontario was at 153 people in the ICU a week ago, and it was 207 Thursday. Surgeries are being cancelled, here and there. The modelling table pegged 400 in the ICU as the number at which point hospital services start to stop functioning. We’re not there yet, thankfully.

So maybe Ontario is not in crisis, if you define crisis as beds jammed together in the ICU, hallway ventilation, not enough oxygen to go around. It’s a hell of a way to define a crisis, but that’s apparently where we’re at.

Bruce Arthur is a Toronto-based columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: