Summer pause set stage for fall crisis By: Editorial Posted: 7:00 PM CST Friday, Nov. 6, 2020

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/11/2020 (1512 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Preparing for a disaster of any kind is not an exact science. If it were, governments would know precisely what their requirements were in advance and how to deploy resources. Unfortunately, no government is afforded that luxury.

Instead, public-sector leaders rely on well-established emergency-measures planning that uses detailed modelling, proven logistical strategies and expert disaster-preparedness advice. Incident command structures are established to co-ordinate multi-agency efforts, and an “all-of-government” approach is taken.

Even the most robust emergency preparedness systems cannot anticipate all aspects of a disaster. However, effective planning that constantly surveys the battlefield to detect changing circumstances can address emerging threats.

Fighting a disaster is warlike, whether it’s related to overland flooding, wide-scale forest fires or a public-health emergency such as a pandemic. The key to success is to never let up, to plan for as many eventualities as possible and to maintain daily, centralized control over all aspects of a threat. The enemy of success is complacency.

The Pallister government has been accused of taking its foot off the gas over the summer months in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. While the province acted quickly in the spring by establishing a pandemic command structure and making contingency plans to expand hospital capacity, government was lulled into a false sense of security when case numbers fell dramatically soon after.

A three-phase hospital expansion plan has been ready for deployment since the spring. Equipment, including mechanical ventilators, has been ordered and delivered. However, other aspects of pandemic planning were put on the back burner. The province’s incident command centre was deactivated June 1 and government shifted its attention to reopening the economy.

Premier Brian Pallister insists pandemic planning never stopped, even after the command structure was disbanded. That may be. But the evidence clearly shows a lack of preparedness in key areas, including COVID-19 testing, contact tracing, protecting personal-care homes and adequately staffing health-care facilities.

Government was caught flatfooted in all those areas and is now scrambling to redeploy resources to fill gaps. In doing so, it has lost precious time. It waited a month into the second wave of the pandemic to reactivate its incident command structure. There were delays in shoring up testing capacity, and only now is government finding additional resources to boost contact tracing.

Long waits for testing results continue to cause delays in tracking and isolating infected Manitobans. Backlogs in contact tracing mean close contacts may be spreading the virus for days without knowing it. And insufficient staffing at health-care facilities is exacerbating personnel shortages, as workers are forced off the job to self-isolate. Much of this could have been avoided through better planning.

A call for volunteers this week to fill unpaid positions at testing sites and other facilities is one of the most glaring examples of the Pallister government’s lack of preparedness. The whole point of emergency planning is to assess needs in advance and put resources in place before they’re required. The province is now playing catch-up instead of staying ahead of the pandemic curve.

The rapid spread of the virus in Manitoba in recent weeks cannot be attributed solely to poor government planning. Complacency among some members of the public (and a reckless disregard for public-health orders by a few) have been major contributors.

But when government takes its eye off the ball in a public-health emergency, as the Pallister government did, there are consequences that cannot be easily reversed.