"It's time to take the burden of 'saving' the healthcare system off individuals and push the government to improve it".
Dr. Suman Charkrabarti ( Infectious Disease Specialist- Trillium Health)
A quarter of Ontario's hospitals were already working beyond 100 percent capacity before the pandemic. That must change.
Some COVID-19 restrictions should be lifted but if we end mask and vaccine mandates too quickly or too early it would be like " playing Russion roulette. If it wouldn't be a complete public health disaster, that would just be by sheer dumb luck." (Dr. Peter Juni, scientific director of Ontario's Science Advisory table).
If we lifted all restrictions today, as some protesters are demanding we do, the outcome could be the best case scenario of a small and manageable increase in infections ( very unlikely given the nature or Omicron) or the worse case scenario with up to one third of Ontario's hospital beds filled with COVID-19 patients. Our provincial health care systems were very fragile to begin with, vastly underfunded and under-resourced. The pandemic exposed this fragility and made it necessary for ordinary people like you and me to sacrifice so much to keep one another healthy.
Had our healthcare systems been more robust and resilient, could we have avoided prolonged mandates? I think so. Do we still need them? Definitely, but not for long.
Stay the course. There are 2,230 people hospitalized with COVID-19 today; there were 3,019 a week ago. There are 486 patients in the ICU, the first time since Jan 11th that this number has fallen below 500. We did that without protesting a law breaking. We protected our fragile healthcare system and in so doing, took care of one another. Our science advisors and healthcare experts will lead us out of pandemic COVID and on to endemic COVID. We'll get there. Clear the streets. Let us get our work done.
Anne-Marie
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