Dear Editor,
This weekend there was another local covid death recorded. This last month, an average of one person every four days has died from covid in Grey Bruce.
Our hospitals have had to postpone non-urgent treatments for people, so that others who have to be hospitalized with covid can be treated. About half of those covid hospitalizations are people who have not been vaccinated, which means the 16% of Canadians who aren't vaccinated are taking 50% of the hospital beds.
This is going to happen every winter, during cold and flu season, unless we develop a better response than this year.
At grocery stores, I don’t see others wearing N95s. The idea that it’s safe to gather indoors to eat at restaurants is absurd. Without proper masks being worn at all times, the safety precautions we are using while gathering indoors is security theatre.
This cold and flu season, we completely lost our testing capabilities. While we don’t know how many people contracted the virus locally, one person has died every four days in the last month. That’s 1/3 of all the covid deaths we’ve had since this pandemic began, so it seems fair to presume a very large majority of us were exposed.
Two years into this pandemic, we have a lot of data demonstrating long-term health effects from contracting this virus, such as an increased risk of diabetes and heart disease. This will only cause more pressure on our over-strained health care services as we move forward, unless we seriously commit to stopping the spread. There’s also data that severe covid leads to decreased IQ scores, which in my opinion is the very last thing we need in our communities these days.
I support the right to protest, regardless of whether I support the objectives of the protesters. I have pandemic fatigue as well, but I’m not naive enough to think wanting the pandemic to be over will make it happen.
As we near the end of cold and flu season this year, and the numbers begin to drop, and the weather gets warmer, and the threat of transmission naturally subsides, I fear we will forget the lessons we should have collectively learned this winter and be caught unprepared again next winter.
Tamara Sargent, Owen Sound
