The year is just beginning and we are already doing the accounts in an atmosphere of panic and disbelief for some, weariness and exasperation for others. The breaking point is approaching, warned the Minister of Health, Christian Dubé. It’s the right Dr Arruda who leaves the “commands” of the boat (remember the word “hospital-centered”) for all sorts of reasons that will not change anything in this health system based largely on the disempowerment of the patient and individual freedoms supported by a net collective security.
The scapegoat ensures the cohesion of the group. The Dr Arruda will conveniently give Ostrogoths and the unvaccinated a break. The “health contribution” suppository, which appeared this week, is a red flag in front of a furious bull, an angry population.
We must learn from this pandemic and come out of it better prepared and equipped to face possible more lethal variants or a new pandemic.
Public Health did not exist two years ago on the radar of the CAQ. What is 2.8% of the health budget, when the World Health Organization recommends at least 5%? François Legault met the national director of public health, the good Horacio, on Monday March 9, 2020, for the very first time. On March 13, there was a state of health emergency throughout the territory. The Dr Arruda had been in office since 2012, premier since 2018, and a pandemic was as likely as the return of the Expos in their minds, when many scientists had been staring into the void for years. If you have seen the movie Don’t Look Up, you make the link. Denial has a good back. The stupidity and deafness of the species are to be considered.
To return to the crisis that violates our individual rights, our hospital-centered health system is not designed to manage a pandemic. An emergency humanitarian operations manager pointed it out in our pages last week (bit.ly/3zT3KKj). Cyril Stein proposed care centers for COVID patients, deployed by the army, as has been done in particular in China, the United States, Thailand and Morocco, to avoid hospital outages and “give a chance to the staff ».
The hospital-centric brothel
Pediatrician Joanne Liu recently mentioned in an interview that her skates were already sharpened to replace the Dr Arruda or help the government, but it was already considered “uncontrollable” in 2020, according to what Sophie Langlois reported to Radio-Canada. We seem to have preferred a man of confidence to him. We can vaccinate with all our might, the fact remains that Quebec is on pause because of a system whose inhospitable emergencies were already cracking under the effect of a simple flu in January well before 2020. We are parking old people in hotels by calling natural caregivers… for help, to tell symptomatic people to stay at home for lack of rapid tests,to require parents to play teachers and teachers to ape youtubers. Does Denys Arcand take notes for his next Decline ?
Hospital employees in the broad sense (technicians, speech therapists, occupational therapists, etc.) are recruited to become vaccinators. We take out the oranges to practice throwing the dart, explained to me the paramedic who stung me this week. Some pediatric employees are asked to classify DYP files to prioritize cases or to go and change sheets in homeless centers that are creaking under pressure. A “source” working in the hospital system told me that his colleagues do night shifts in other units in addition to their regular daytime work.
Our hospital-centered vision has not favored home care and has gone against public health (prevention, education, empowerment) by regularly cutting off supplies. “The public health program has been the program in which the government has invested the least compared to other programs over the past 15 years”, indicated CIRANO in 2021 (bit.ly/3ffJ9X0). It was very refreshing to hear the Dr Arruda and Minister Dubé talk about empowerment and self-management before Christmas when we have accustomed an entire population to relying on doctors and “pills” in health matters. Moreover, since the vaccines, we hardly speak of comorbidities, as if they had magically disappeared. Chronic diseases are the brioche and the butter of doctors. And the crowding of the beds too.
Responsible without intentions
The word “responsible” has a double meaning: it is the one to whom the fault is imputable and the one who answers for his acts. In short, guilty and not guilty. Justin Trudeau evokes the word “sans-dessein” about influencers on the go, Emmanuel Macron, in France, that of “non-citizens” for the non-vaccinated (maybe talking about his fellow citizens who hide their money in the Bahamas or Switzerland). The culprits are identified. Nevertheless, we may have to review our way of doing things, as suggested this week by the editor-in-chief of the Duty, Marie-Andrée Chouinard, in an editorial: “For a few hundred beds in the hospital system, Quebec is completely paralyzed, despite spectacular vaccination rates” (bit.ly/3HX3RY3).
I listened to the interview given by the epidemiologist and public health doctor Alice Desbiolles on the antenna of Europe 1 last week, in France. Even if the French are subject to much less severe measures than ours, she warns Public Health against the temptation to fall into the field of morality rather than that of ethics. “The only culprits are the factors that contributed to the emergence and spread of this infectious agent on a planetary scale. »
The cost of pandemics is 100 times greater than the estimated cost of preventing them
The doctor mentions an IPBES report, Escaping the Age of Pandemics, and warns that it will take a complete paradigm shift for the future. “Resuscitation does not have the monopoly on the lack of beds, the lack of caregivers. Resuscitation does not have a monopoly on suffering, unfortunately. Health is something much more global, ”she says, referring to intensive care and referring in particular to mental health and the fate of children.
In other words, if we persist on this path, the consequences will be much more serious for the entire population, 90% vaccinated, but 110% disgusted.