Not surprising – 680 News has confirmed that Ontario will be entering “Grey level lockdown” on Boxing Day and not Christmas Eve as was previously reported. Diverge Media has been expecting a lockdown for a couple of months now and has talked about it numerous times in broadcasts.
We weren’t caught off-guard here at Diverge – and likely many of our viewers weren’t either. The government’s posture has been one that has indicated this decision was coming for some time now. Ford has been announcing increases in cases and saying that “everything is on the table.” Many predicted another eventual lockdown right before or around the Christmas season based on their gut feelings.
The reason for this thought process is fairly simple – Flu/Covid season will have begun again around this time and we knew we would see an increase in cases. Given that our government’s focus continues to be on cases and not ICU or Hospitalizations it seemed evident to those thinking about the matter that this would be an inevitability.
Currently, there are 915 hospitalized in Ontario with Covid. There are roughly 384 hospitals in Ontario. This means that per hospital (numbers vary at each hospital) there are an estimated 2.38 patients in Ontario with Covid per hospital – where’s this number in the media reports? In addition, Ontario has long struggled with having enough hospital beds. Ford even ran on ending hallway medicine – something that has been a major problem in Ontario for some time, and it’s not improving.
Hospital beds per 1000
According to the Ontario Health Coalition, Ontario ranks the worst out of all provinces for hospital beds per 1000 people. This is a major problem considering Ontario has the largest population of all provinces in Canada at 14,773,299. The problem has continued under Premier Ford. Currently, Ontario has just 2.2 hospital beds per 1000 people. For the province with the biggest population in all of Canada – this is more than problematic. I say all of this to say, the problem of highly occupied hospitals isn’t new to Covid – it’s been like this for a long time.
Canada ranks near bottom of Universal Health Care Countries on wait times, hospital beds
According to a Fraser Institute report from 2019, Canada ranks 26th out of 27 for hospital beds per 1000 people. It also ranks 26th out of 27 for Doctors per thousand people. This is despite the fact that Canada’s health care spending as a percentage of GDP ranks 2nd among Universal health care nations included in the study.
This points to the fact that we have a healthcare management problem – not an underfunded healthcare system. This is all antidotal on the Covid numbers but is important to keep in your mind when the government talks about our healthcare system being “over-run” because of Covid. Our healthcare system was in bad shape before any of this ever took place and the numbers have long shown this.
As we pointed out in a previous article, lockdowns have done little to stop the spread of Covid and neither has the mask mandate – so why are we doing it again. Why not protect the most vulnerable? Still, the largest issue Canada has to deal with is Long term care facilities – and we’re still fairing poorly in that metric.
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