You sang ? I’m delighted :Well, dance now.

The cicada having sung
All summer long,
Found herself most destitute
When the north wind blew…

Jean De La Fontaine

Since May, most of our “layers of protections” have been removed, leaving us with only vaccinations to fight Covid with.

It’s not enough.

In a world where there is a prevalence of new variants, first BA.4, then BA.5, and now, BA.275, nicknamed the “dark horse” of the pandemic, which are known to evade immunity conferred by original vaccines, we are bound to face wave after wave after wave.

Sure, it’s all nice that the government now opened the fourth shot to everybody over 18, however that’s not going to stop the spread. And hundreds of thousands of sick people mean thousands of hospitalizations. It doesn’t matter if we feel we are done with Covid. Covid isn’t done with us. We need to go back to adding layers of protection. And we need to do it NOW, during summer, before it’s too late.

But we’re not. This government is good at “too little, too late” and that’s just what it will do, once again. People are out there partying, acting like Covid is a thing of the past, singing… But make no mistake about it. The wind of the north IS soon coming.

Masking should have never been removed. It’s an effective tool in our tool box. It was well implemented, embedded in our daily lives. Most of us were used to it and didn’t really care about wearing them anymore. Now that things have returned to normal, Ontario will face resistance when they try to reimpose mask mandates and gathering limits, and this will happen sooner or later.

Sooner would be better, so what are they waiting for? Just about every doctor and scientist in the province is sounding the alarm. Is Ford scared the truckers’ Freedom Convoy may come back?

We know that we’re a bit behind when it comes to counting Covid cases. What we see today is the result of what happened two weeks ago. We’ve already seen a 25% increase in cases since the beginning of summer and the count is getting higher and higher each day. It’s hard to see the true picture as our government is not testing nor providing numbers anymore, really. We have to dig deep to find anything. But the emergency department in Perth had to shut down due to a Covid outbreak. It has been CLOSED since July 2nd. Read that again. The emergency department is CLOSED. Doesn’t that sound problematic to you?

What happens in the fall when thousands of us get sick and need hospitalizations and other Emergency Departments start closing, hit by outbreaks? Will we need to travel hundreds of miles to seek treatment? What will happen when people needing urgent care for heart attacks, appendicitis, broken bones are turned away? What happens when we have to start postponing surgeries, again, despite the huge backlog already there. What happens when our medical staff, already stretched thin, reaches burnout level? I’ll tell you what will happen: people will die.

Covid has never been the main threat to us as individuals. As much as Covid can be seen to be destroying our healthcare system what it’s really doing is highlighting how fragile it has become. We have less beds than we used to with an increase in population. It’s disgusting to see what the government Is not doing to fix the situation. Where is the 4 billion dollars the Ford Government received from the Federal Government for Covid? Why are our doctors and nurses leaving? How come our current Emergency wait times are 20 hours or more?

With Covid, combined with an ever growing housing crisis, the looming shortages of food items and the increasing cost of living, fall will be grim, my friends.

We could, like the ant in De La Fontaine’s poem, have used this summer to prepare, stay safe, hunker down, making sure fall doesn’t become another shit show. We certainly had the money to make sure systems were in place. What did the Ford Government do? Zip. Zilch. Nada.

But hey, like the cicada, we prefer to sing.