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Thursday, December 3, 2020

COVID and Pre-existing Conditions

 One thing has been quite clear since March: if you have pre-existing conditions that you did not know about, COVID revealed them.  This is not just true for the human body but for people and political systems.  Today's exemplar:

The Premier (Governor) of Manitoba Brian Pallister said: ""This puts Manitobans at the back of the line. This hurts Manitobans, to put it mildly." Apparently, First Nations folks residing in Manitoba aren't Manitobans.  Hello, white supremacy!  I don't know much about Pallister, but what I have observed for the past several months is that many of the Premiers of Canada have been utter failures as leaders.  They didn't use the summer to improve the testing/tracing system, they didn't set up their schools for success, and they mandated masks mostly too damned late.  The US is not alone in having weak leadership in this crisis.  The epidemic revealed how weak these leaders are.

Likewise, Canadian federalism has not performed great.  While folks want to blame Trudeau for a lot, and they should for much stuff, many of the big decisions and big failures are out of his reach unless he invokes the Emergency Act.  Given the usually dire state of federal-provincial relations, that has been a non-starter.  Trudeau can't force the provinces to shut down or mandate masks apparently.  

COVID 19 also revealed the weaknesses in the international health system, with WHO pandering to one of its key funders (China), and with US desertion of its leadership role greatly undermining the international response.  

I could go on and on, but this pandemic has revealed that I have an attention deficit problems.





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