When Does the Drama End?

Ditch the COVID protocols already.

Click to enlarge. Screen capture from front page of the Alberta Children’s Hospital website. Full page screen capture here. Visit the website here.

It’s May 2023. But the Alberta Children’s Hospital website still has an emergency-yellow banner across the top announcing that “Continuous masking remains in effect” in all Alberta hospitals.

Next there’s a headline in bold - an “Important Message” that begins:

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues…

Inquiring minds want to know: When will the pandemic be declared over? When does the drama end? When do we finally turn the page and get back to normal?

Six months from now? 16 months? Six years? Seriously, when does this crap finally go away?

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Read down a little further in that Important Message and you come to this:

Thank you for helping keep our patients and healthcare staff healthy.

Excuse me? The entire purpose of a hospital is to minister to sick people. Hospitals exist to serve sick people and their families.

It isn’t the job of sick children and their stressed-out parents to keep healthcare staff healthy. Sick children have enough on their plate. How dare a hospital lay this burden on them!

Ladies and gentlemen, we have an enormous problem. We gave health care officials an inch, they took a country mile, and now they have no interest in returning to normal. Two weeks to flatten the curve was about protecting our health care system from full scale collapse. For a brief period in 2020 it got truly scary in a few US cities. There really were refrigerated trucks parked outside New York City hospitals. Morgues really were overflowing.

But no Canadian hospitals came anywhere near collapsing under the weight of COVID patients. Even if they had, that was three bleeping years ago.

Using COVID as an excuse today to lord it over the families of sick children - to regiment and restrict visitation, to make life more difficult and miserable than it needs to be - is appalling. Truly appalling.