Juno News - The government failed to protect the vulnerable

00:00:00.000 When it comes to battling the pandemic in Canada, I hope we can all agree on the fact that what we

00:00:09.840 should be doing is actually going after the trouble spots, dealing with the actual problems,

00:00:15.480 the people who are going to be hard hit by the pandemic, by the coronavirus, the people who are

00:00:19.680 most at risk and who could tragically die of COVID-19. We're learning more and more about

00:00:25.360 how this virus works. The first wave, awful stuff, and we had no clue what was going on. Medical

00:00:30.160 experts said, we don't know how to treat this stuff. But I've had the privilege of speaking

00:00:33.600 with a number of doctors who are actually on the front lines and they've been treating coronavirus

00:00:37.120 patients. And they say, more or less, well, we got this now. We figured out how things work. We

00:00:42.560 figured out how to treat patients. Yes, it's true questions about long COVID and obviously these

00:00:47.640 vaccines. Those questions are not fully answered. But in terms of what steroids to give people and

00:00:52.560 when and how much and so forth, well, they've largely answered a lot of those questions and

00:00:57.120 things are going pretty well. People are coming into the hospital, but more of them are leaving.

00:01:00.960 It is not the death sentence that it used to be. So the people who are actually treating coronavirus

00:01:06.240 patients, they have a lot of positive stories to tell. That news isn't getting out there as much as

00:01:12.000 it should. But the one thing those doctors do caution is that long-term care homes, nursing homes,

00:01:18.000 the elderly, they still are very much at risk. They are our most vulnerable. Now we've known that

00:01:24.080 though for quite some time. We're just learning it even more now. And the question is, why didn't

00:01:29.360 government do more to prevent what we're seeing in the second wave right now? And the majority

00:01:34.960 of those deaths are people who are much older, over 70, over 80 people in long-term care in nursing

00:01:40.640 homes. One example, back in March in Ontario, at the end of March, they announced a $17 billion

00:01:46.320 COVID package. Okay, great. $17 billion to address the problem, right? Well, hold on a second though.

00:01:52.480 Most of that again was economic support. Only just over $3 billion of that went into healthcare. And of

00:01:58.240 that $3 billion, just about $250 million of it went into long-term care facilities. And you say,

00:02:04.480 okay, Fury, well that was early days. That was March. We learned a bit more. What did they announce

00:02:07.520 in April, May, June, July, August, and so forth? Not much, not at all. One would think there would be

00:02:13.280 historic investments in healthcare all across the country. It is true that there were some field

00:02:18.480 hospitals that were created by various different regional health hubs to deal with an overflow of

00:02:24.080 patients, things that they built in parking lots and so forth. A few of them are already online,

00:02:28.320 and for the most part, actually haven't been able to, haven't needed to be used yet. But what about

00:02:32.960 when it comes to propping up nursing homes, supporting them, bringing in more goods, material,

00:02:36.800 and so forth? Well, there's been a few little investments here and there, and actually in November,

00:02:40.960 they announced about $50 million to train an extra over 3,000 people to work in these facilities.

00:02:47.680 But hold on, they're just announcing that now in November, and there really wasn't any comparable

00:02:52.160 announcement prior to that in, oh, I don't know, the summer when we actually had a lot of time to

00:02:56.400 hunker down and prepare for the second wave and prepared where it really mattered in terms of actually

00:03:02.560 addressing the problem. Instead, you hear Ontario Premier Doug Ford and others bleeding on about,

00:03:06.800 oh, there's not going to be a Christmas, and you can't see your family, you can't do this,

00:03:10.480 you can't do that, more lockdowns, people calling for more lockdowns. Not enough people,

00:03:15.120 though, calling to actually tackle where the doctors who are interacting with coronavirus patients

00:03:20.800 in the hospital tell you is the hotspot and where we actually need to target, which is long-term care.

00:03:27.200 It's a real failure, and it really is a scandal that a lot of regular folks are being told,

00:03:32.240 no, you can't do your fitness class or what have you. They are being punished largely for government's

00:03:37.520 failure to actually pinpoint and address the real issues that they've already known

00:03:42.480 for quite some time. Profoundly disappointing.

Juno News - November 17, 2020

The government failed to protect the vulnerable

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