Society has largely moved on from COVID. Our leaders and the media hardly talk about future pandemics. It seems that in some ways we’ll be less prepared than before. It’s hard to see how the cuts to health care funding announced by the Legault government won’t reduce the capacity and readiness of our health care system. We would have hoped for more vision from a government that navigated the last crisis and ended up with the worst mortality rates of any province, largely concentrated in our nursing and long-term care homes.
We’re just now getting an idea of the damage suffered by children during the COVID lockdowns, which deprived them of precious learning time. As could have been expected, it was the most vulnerable kids who fell the farthest behind. Still, we don’t have a lot of hard numbers to judge the severity of the problems. In the PISA international standardized tests of 2022, globally children were found to be about seven months behind where they otherwise would have been. The next test, conducted this year, will shed more light on the subject, but again, these results are on the aggregate.
In future pandemics, will we have learned lessons from what worked well and what didn’t during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic? Can we simply substitute online learning for in-class instruction, especially if the worst of the physical toll of the next pandemic isn’t felt by children? The so-called Spanish flu of 1917-1918 hit younger people particularly hard, mostly because older generations had some protection due to exposure to the so-called Russian flu of the early 1890s. COVID was the opposite.
Perhaps most important is a clear plan for communication during pandemics. Uncertainties such as the effectiveness of masks and vaccines were largely swept under the rug. First, we were told not to wear masks, in order to ensure a steady supply for health care workers. Then we were told that surgical masks provided strong protection against infection for the wearer, instead of just helping to reduce the chances of a wearer’s infection spreading to others. Soon people who were feeling sick felt it was okay to go out as long as they wore masks. And as we got COVID shots, the media and health officials told us that they offered lifelong protection against COVID infection. Many felt dismayed when the messaging changed to a more accurate description of the benefits – reduced odds of severe infection. Now vaccination coverage rates for other illnesses like polio and measles are getting dangerously low.
We’ll have no excuse during the next major health crisis if we’re as unprepared as we were for COVID.
