Five years since WHO declared pandemic
It’s exactly five years since the World Health Organization declared SARS‑CoV‑2 a global pandemic. Most media have been posting pieces about Covid‑19 to mark this less than jolly anniversary.
Radio‑Canada asks what we’ve learned, not so much about how to handle pandemics in general, but about how the lockdown and distancing period affected people, especially young people. Are they really more subdued than they should be?
The Journal asks whether Quebec is prepared to face any new pandemic, the fear being that people would be less inclined to follow health mandates a second time around, and that people would be more inclined to believe conspiracy theories and false advice. The rate of measles vaccination, for example, has dropped since Covid, although one might have hoped that people would recognize the value of immunizations rather than deploring them.
La Presse has a dossier examining other questions – how the current Quebec government plan is reaching healthcare workers (not well), what healthcare workers think about our capacity to react (not much) – and a few things that are going well.
CBC looked into victims of long Covid.
Blork 12:20 on 2025-03-11 Permalink
It’s important and useful to ask these questions and to study these things. Unfortunately, too many people are doing it judgmentally, without regard for the learning potential. I’m sure many mistakes were made, particularly in the early days. But there’s no point in throwing stones and pointing fingers. We had nothing to go on; so many unknowns and so much to figure out in a very short period of time.
While it wasn’t the world’s first pandemic, it was the first pandemic of the current technological era. Things are drastically different now than they were in, for example, 1919 with the Spanish flu. The extent to which people move around — by air, by car, by public transit — has exploded in the century since then. The level of information exchange — both bad and good — is unprecedented. Our understanding of how diseases spread and how they can be contained, while far from complete, is unbelievably advanced since 1919.
So what happens when you get an unknown disease spreading rapidly through an extremely mobile population, amidst bogs and bogs of new and sometimes conflicting scientific knowledge and information? You get mistakes. You also get miracles (or at least lucky breaks because some things were done right). But when we’re making those decisions early in the process it’s impossible to know which decisions will be mistakes and which will lead to miracles.
So let’s study the pandemic and learn from it, and resist the urge to point fingers and throw stones.
MarcG 14:05 on 2025-03-11 Permalink
The UK Covid Inquiry clearly exposed that a lot was known but not acted upon, and I think it’s fair to want some kind of accountability.
Nicholas 17:05 on 2025-03-11 Permalink
Paul Wells has reported a few times on the lack of inquiry, and the actual inquiry report, which was named The Time to Act is Know, and was quietly released and mostly ignored by those who needed to act.
nau 17:07 on 2025-03-11 Permalink
@Blork In your new role of Arbiter of Permissable Posting, can you advise the rest of us on your ruling as to whether it is cricket to point at our stones and “throw” the finger?
Blork 17:20 on 2025-03-11 Permalink
@nau, please go back to Twitter where it’s normal to be combative and sarcastic without even understanding what you’re replying to.
Internet archivists of the future will understand that my comment above has nothing to do with permissible posting and everything to do with the general discourse around looking back at the pandemic.
Kate 17:30 on 2025-03-11 Permalink
🤨
roberto 08:24 on 2025-03-12 Permalink
Many people seem eager to move on from the COVID era—forget the isolation, the divisions, and the chaos. Forget the massive government’s spending and the massive debts left in the wake. It’s almost as if we collectively wish we could just declare bankruptcy and pretend it never happened, as if the world isn’t already full of enough new challenges to face
MarcG 10:09 on 2025-03-12 Permalink
The denial required to move on from something that is still happening is a heavy burden. From an article in the JdM today: “Le réseau québécois de cliniques pour la COVID longue reçoit encore, chaque mois, une centaine de nouveaux patients, qui doivent parfois attendre jusqu’à six mois avant de pouvoir être pris en charge.”
Kevin 10:26 on 2025-03-12 Permalink
That “massive” government spending prevented millions of Canadians from losing their homes, kept businesses open, and prevented a recession.
It should be self-evident that this is why we have governments — to do the things that private industry can or will not do — especially since we can look to history and see what happens when there isn’t government support to deal with a pandemic.
The division and chaos were amplified by bad actors and too many people fell victim to a lack of online media literacy. That, more than anything else, is the bad legacy of the pandemic, especially evident in the people who insist with utmost certainty their belief in things that just aren’t so. And that should be countered by widespread lessons in civics, in understanding the underlying systems that hold our society together, and in rebuilding community groups instead of reinforcing online echo chambers.
Tim 13:59 on 2025-03-12 Permalink
@kevin: there is no need to put massive in quotes; the spending for covid was huge. Do you have any data that shows it saved millions of homeowners or businesses?
What has been quantified is the amount of fraud that took place, up to 8 billion dollars worth. How convenient that an Access to Information request turned up nothing…
https://torontosun.com/news/national/feds-mum-on-whos-to-blame-for-8b-in-fraudulent-cerb-payments-report
Kevin 18:54 on 2025-03-12 Permalink
Let’s see. About half of Canadians say they live paycheque to paycheque according to multiple surveys.
About 6.5 million received CERB payments of about $80 billion, letting them and their dependents stay home instead of forcing them to go to unsafe workplaces/schools and spreading the disease at a time when hospitals were overhelmed.
Roughly 700,000 CEBA loans to businesses for another $31 bilion.
Of course about 190,000 people later had to make repayments and there was some fraud (there is always fraud-what matters is catching it).
But yeah, I think that spending the money so people could stay at home saved a lot of lives.
A lot of people lost their minds and got suckered by propaganda, but we could easily have had 250,000 dead if we look at the proportions from the 1918 pandemic.
Chris 20:09 on 2025-03-12 Permalink
Hopefully one of the things we learned is that vaccine mandates, however well-intentioned, are ultimately a bad idea.
nau 20:10 on 2025-03-12 Permalink
@blork You’re taking my post approximately infinitely more seriously than the spirit in which I wrote it. I don’t generally refer to things being “cricket” or come up with nonsense roles like “Arbiter of Permissable Posting” when I’m being combative. Given the absurdity of the age, I will however cop to a certain engrained tendency to sarcasm, which I suppose colours the bit involving you that was the setup I came up with for the dumb punchline I wanted to deliver because my brain has a weakness for inversions. As for the rest, I can’t go back to twitter since I was never on it, and there was nothing difficult to understand about your post.
Kevin 20:33 on 2025-03-12 Permalink
Chris
We’ve had vaccine mandates in Canada for more than a century.
What’s that saying? A conservative is someone who gets upset about learning something in middle age something the rest of us learned as children?
Kate 21:33 on 2025-03-12 Permalink
I’m old enough to have had a mandated smallpox vax when I was small. Smallpox is the example I’ve given on the rare occasion I’ve run into anti‑vax sentiments. Ask them, how many people they know who’ve had smallpox. They will, of course, say “none” – and then you point out, mandated smallpox vaccination has eradicated that disease forever. It works.
(By the time I had the vax, smallpox was no longer a threat, but the mandate lingered for awhile, until we were sure it was gone. Unlike measles.)
Tux 00:03 on 2025-03-14 Permalink
Kids are f***ing dying of measles in Ontario right now, because parents that were almost certainly vaccinated against it themselves refused to give their children the same advantage, and that is a situation that came about solely because vaccination was something conservatives used to sow division and fear during the pandemic. Anyone who talks shit about vaccines has the blood of children on their hands.