New modelling warns of growing variant infections in workplaces

The Toronto Star reports more than 920 Amazon workers in Toronto have contracted COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. The Star has learned new provincial modelling shows highly contagious viral variants are disproportionately impacting those with essential jobs. MORE
 

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Wow! What an earthshaking insight into COVID-19 spread. It has only taken 13 months to figure out.
 
Next, it may dawn on the doctors and politicians who want our trust that essential workers do not just contact other essential workers. Imagine that! Heads will explode across the nation.

Health care professionals and politicians learned nothing from the horrendous spread of infections and deaths in personal care facilities in the past year. Essential workers spread the virus from one facility to another. Those afraid of infection found other work increasing under staffing of PCFs.
  
Those who delight in ordering us about have not recognized that international travel is hazardous to our health. We have cases of COVID variants throughout Canada. They did not get here by accident – people who are from or visited other countries where the virus variants were present brought new risks to us. Internal travellers contributed to the spread.

Gnashing our teeth and issuing warnings over the rapid spread of virus variants is silly when we leave the gates open to international travel and new sources of infection.

Many of us have been warning that virus spread cannot be contained until we protect essential workers with paid time off for COVID quarantine and quarantine the whole family rather than a single ill person. Expecting employers to pick up the tab for COVID sick leave is ridiculous. Either our government is combatting virus spread or not. They have defaulted to “not.”

The psychology of lockdowns is to establish control. Pages of detailed COVID regulation reveal how little our medical and political people understand about the people they serve. Neither group has any experience in dealing with an epidemic, and neither group did any planning for the inevitable epidemic. They were caught flat-footed with no equipment, plans or operating structure in place. They turned emergency preparedness into a sick joke.

Income replacement should have been part of the virus containment policy, not an afterthought when people displaced from their workplaces were desperate. Our infectious disease specialists get a failing grade in virus containment. In fairness, they are hampered by politicians with a different plan. 
  
The first wave should have been met with workable plans, but we had none. The second wave should have been fought with lessons learned in the spring of 2020. They failed to learn. This third wave is unforgivable. Our governments are stuck in the mud, unwilling to recognize flaws in their containment policies and unable to pivot to improve containment efforts.

Fining people for failing to follow failed COVID regulations is a measure of how desperate and devoid of problem-solving ability our governments are. Pleading with us to stay home while they do not (unless it is to avoid accountability) is the ultimate insult.

Nothing the governments do now can reduce the rate of infections over the next 4 to 6 weeks. Lockdowns do not keep essential workers home. Governments don’t have enough vaccines to protect them or an income replacement plan in place to allow essential workers to stay home if they are ill.

Worse, we have no idea how many essential workers can stay home before essential services crash.