COVID. Even the word is gradually slipping into oblivion. That of governments and, by ripple effect, ours. However, according to many experts, the reality is at the antipodes. The pandemic is stubborn and lasts.
With its increasingly contagious variants. His dead. Its recurring increases in hospitalizations. Its reinfections which are multiplying and leaving more and more people with major sequelae, physical or neurological.
If the pandemic persists, it is also because in the West, most political and public health decision-makers have limited themselves to minimal service for a few months.
Exit the precautionary principle. They lift the sanitary measures. For so-called normal life and the economy to resume. Even if this normality is only apparent.
Service minimal
Minimal service also means talking about the pandemic more and more rarely.
Except, briefly, when yet another wave shows up.
As Minister of Health Christian Dubé and Dr. Luc Boileau, National Director of Public Health, did yesterday in their first joint press conference since February.
In the West, minimal service is simply advising people to be careful. To wear the mask if they "personally" think they have to. For the most vulnerable, good luck.
We suggest that they wear a mask and not go out to restaurants, movies, etc.
In short, to place yourself under a glass bell because sanitary measures are no longer compulsory for everyone.
Minimal service means offering people infected with COVID the opportunity to isolate themselves for a few days without financially supporting less well-off workers.
It is suggesting to get another dose of vaccine based on a “decision tree”.
This means that the situation is “under control for the moment”. However, the emergencies are overflowing.
Surgeries are skipping. Thousands of health workers are absent because they are infected in the same community where sanitary measures no longer exist. Not to mention the importance of ventilation, which no one talks about.
Responsible and supportive
Finally, minimal service is congratulations between Western political decision-makers for committing the same mistakes in chorus. Unsurprisingly, their own fatigue fuels ours and vice versa.
As soon as we lifted the imposition of the mask in transport and closed public places, almost all people removed it immediately. How can you blame them for doing what they have the right to do? Without obligation, only a tiny minority wears it.
While not infallible, this simple measure, along with others, has been proven to help slow the spread of COVID. In the West, however, the decision-makers judged that the voters no longer wanted it. In this, the anti-mask movements have had a following.
However, we cannot imagine the same governments lifting the imposition of seat belts because it limits our “freedom”.
They don't because it saves many lives.
Faced with COVID, the same logic should still apply to known measures.
Policy makers tell us to learn to “live with COVID”. So why abandon measures which, in addition to being simple, would make it possible to do so in a more responsible and supportive way?
