The Sixth Wave

The Omicron BA.2 variant is steadily increasing as a proportion of all cases and is dominant in some regions of Canada. This has started a sixth wave in Quebec and Ontario. The rest of Canada will follow soon. The same signs are not as strong in the U.S. right now but will likely follow this same pattern that started in Europe In January.

Here is a frank report by Colin Furness who doesn’t dance around to avoid criticizing government policy but tells it like it is. 

“There’s no doubt a sixth wave of Covid-19 is sweeping across Ontario being driven by the highly transmissible BA.2 subvariant. At the same time restrictions have been lifted. We’ve opened the doors to a new variant, then eliminated all of our defenses.”
Sixth wave in Ontario driven by lifting restrictions

Like most of the other pandemic waves Doug Ford ignored the recommendations of doctors and his own Science Table and implemented controls too little and/or too late or controsl that didn’t make sense (such as closing playgrounds!) because of his own political reasons, ignoring the principles of public health safety.

As any dummy with two eyes or even one eye can see, even though the number of hospitalizations in Ontario have come down a lot from the peak on Jan 23, the current number of people in hospital is still quite high and has started to go back up. 

Removing the vaccine mandate was not actually a bad decision. The Omicron variant can inhabit the nasal passages of people who have been vaccinated. They might not get very sick with Covid or even know that they are infected but they can still pass on the virus to others. The rationale for a vaccine mandate was to provide safe spaces for people who were vaccinated where they could congregate with a low risk of being exposed to the virus. Since people can now catch the virus from other vaccinated people, a vaccine mandate no longer offers the same protection.

However, ending the mask mandate was really a bad decision. There is not a single doctor who agrees with this Ford government policy. .Masks are your last line of defense as summarized in this diagram from an earlier blog. 

Everyone who cares about their health should be using a K/N95 mask for maximum 83% protection as summarized by the results in this recent study.

I have pointed out the shortcomings of public health and government policies on many occasions. Many doctors have also been critical of the poor decisions that have been made and recommended actions based on medicine and science. That is what one would expect. However, it seems that under the Ford government, political pressure has been used to “shut up” doctors who are too critical. When people hear about this type of suppression in China and Russia, they are incensed. So how can it happen here?

This is another dimension of how badly Ford and his government have handled the pandemic. At 8:17 in this video the doctor reveals that Doug Ford called the CEO of his hospital to complain about the medical facts that the doctor was saying to warn people. The doctor was soon fired from his role as Director of Critical Care at his hospital.
How politics muzzled a doctor.