Because apparently we have no use for the two-step around here.
Waterloo Region’s top public health doctor says the area is on track to move into Step 3 of Ontario’s reopening framework along with the rest of the province next Friday.
“That’s the plan,” medical officer of health Dr. Hsiu-Li Wang said during a weekly COVID-19 briefing. “The plan is to move along with the province going forward.
“We are not out of the woods yet, but we have a path to get there.”Friday morning, provincial officials announced Ontario would move into the third stage of its reopening plan on July 16 – five days ahead of schedule.
But Waterloo Region is the lone health unit jurisdiction across the province that has not yet even moved to Step 2.
Only yesterday did health officials in Waterloo Region announce the area would move into Step 2 on Monday.
Should Waterloo Region follow suit and enter Step 3 at the end of next week, there would be less than five days between Step 2 and Step 3.
It’s been hammered home all pandemic long that doctors, scientists and the like know best. And while that’s largely true, it’s also true that every rule has its exception, and I think we’ve found one here. Maybe everything will work out fine because we have vaccines now, but as someone who has watched us repeatedly get ahead of ourselves in the rush to get back to normal only to wind up worse off than before, this decision is nonsense.
Holding the region back at the end of June was absolutely the right thing to do. Our daily case numbers were among the highest in the province, our hospitals were stuffed with COVID to the point that we were sending people out of town, and we really didn’t know how much havoc Delta was going to cause. Here we are a couple weeks later and while our daily case numbers still aren’t great, other indicators appear to be going the right way. So sure, move us along to step two if you’d like. But for only four days? What are we hoping to accomplish with that? If the answer is anything other than nothing, I respectfully suggest that you all may be out of your minds.
I thought, perhaps foolishly, that the reason we were doing this in stages that were all a few weeks long was so that we could be reasonably certain that each move wouldn’t lead to trouble. We would take our time, look at the data, and then make a well thought out decision about how to proceed. But how can that happen in less than a week? Quite simply, it can’t.
If this is a genuine decision made by the health unit, then I humbly ask that you all take a nice vacation and a long nap. You don’t seem to be thinking so clearly at the moment. But if these choices are being made as a result of pressure from government and the public, can you please tell them all to shove off and let you do your jobs? Yes, we all want our old lives back. But rash, feel good decisions aren’t going to get us there. Those will only get us right back where we were…again.