Time for some journalism accountability: I was wrong, bigly, about the second wave
My cautious optimism was, alas, misplaced. We're gonna get kicked right in the gonads again, it seems. Maybe worse than the first time.
Happy Sunday, Code 47 readers. It was a big week for me. I’ve wrapped up as an editor at the National Post, but will be continuing as a columnist. By total coincidence, a handy Facebook reminder informed me that my last day was precisely six years after Jonathan Kay, one of my predecessors as Post Comment editor, left the same job. Something about Nov. 13.
Alas, in the era of COVID, there was no such ceremony to mark the end of my tenure. But I did have a drink via Zoom with a few colleagues and it was delightful.
Speaking of COVID, I wanted to take the opportunity today to offer up a bit of accountability to my readers. In my profession you make errors — they suck, but it happens — and you also just get stuff wrong. Getting something wrong is not the same, exactly, as an error. An error is flubbing someone’s name or title. Getting stuff wrong means something bigger. And sadly, it’s the latter kind of failure I’m acknowledging today.
I was wrong about the second wave of COVID-19. I really had been cautiously optimistic that it wouldn’t be a huge crisis. I wasn’t confident it would be a breeze; I knew there was major downside risk. But I really was cautiously optimistic that we'd get through it with minimal disruption, and said so, in multiple places, more than once.
I was wrong, and I owe it to my readers to say so.
I was wrong in good faith, I think. My cautious optimism was rooted pretty firmly in simply watching what was happening in Europe. Our allies across the pond have been six to eight weeks ahead of us all along, and when Ontario (and other provinces) began to re-open, and especially when kids went back to school, I began cautiously watching what was happening in Europe. And ... not much was.
Cases had gone up there. Cases did go up here. But not massively and illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths did not go up in lockstep. The second wave did (and still does) look very different from the first. There are a lot of reasons this is so. Improved testing caught cases earlier, when they were less severe. The infected came from younger demographics, less likely to have a serious illness. We do seem to have made real progress at improving health outcomes for those with serious illness. We are saving lives today that we would have lost in the first wave.
So that drove my optimism. I really hoped that all those things, plus better defences around congregate-care settings for the elderly, would mean that we’d manage the second wave effectively.
We aren’t. Not even close .COVID-19 is spreading fast across Canada’s major provinces. Hospitals are filling up. The long-term-care homes are getting hit again. Deaths are rising sharply. And, most ominously of all, Europeans are dying again — lots of them. Every day. More than 500 Italians yesterday. Almost 500 Britons, and just over 350 French.
That’s us next month, probably. Even if we locked down hard today, and I’m not sure there’s any political will to do that, we are in deep enough that we just have to ride this out. It’s going to be a grim winter.
I thought it would be better. I said so. I was wrong. And now I’m admitting that.
A shorter note on an unrelated topic: I guess I'm going to have to keep a notebook again. Many writers keep notebooks (literal or digital) where they stash ideas that come to mind. A few weeks ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with a brilliant idea for a column. And I was 100 per cent sure that the idea was so brilliant I'd easily remember it in the morning. Nope! I forgot. Totally. Over the last few years, I've had so little time to write that finding topics hasn't been a problem. I've had more ideas for columns than opportunities to write. With luck, that won't be the case now. I'll probably have to open up a file on my phone and just jot down the ideas as they come.
I know this seems a simple thing. But I really am quite excited about this prospect. What a change of pace it'll be to have more opportunities to write than easy ideas. I think I'm finally — finally! — going to write that detailed explanation of why the NATO strategy in the horror film 28 Weeks Later was so god awful.
I'm a lot of fun at parties ... well, I was. When we could have parties.
Sigh.
As for what I was up to this week, other than a ton of paperwork at the Post as I wrapped up my tenure as Comment editor, I was able to get one column into the paper on a topic near to my heart: Canadian history. A high school in Halifax has decided that it no longer wants to be named after Canada's first prime minister, and I can't help but roll my eyes a bit at all the outrage over ... what's long been a matter of historical record. "This being 2020," I wrote, "you’re probably expecting me to hurl myself bodily into some culture war pillbox or another, there to unleash the rapid-fire volleys of pre-chewed talking points for one side, or its opposite. Let’s just skip over that whole part of the process, confident that others will dutifully and enthusiastically race forth to do the honours in my place, leaving precisely no one better informed and everyone even further entrenched in whatever opinion they already held at the outset. I’m more interested in a different part of this whole puzzle: perhaps we’d be less inclined to recoil in horror from our history if we actually knew what our history was."
"Macdonald said and did ugly things," I said later. "He oversaw the implementation of ugly policies. These things haunt us still. He also did remarkable and wonderful things, things that Canadians today still benefit from. This isn’t a crisis or a scandal, it’s … history."
And I was also able to sneak in one video for the Post, too.
Over at TVO.org, I have to admit that some of my frustration with Ontario's handling of the second wave is starting to seep through. As noted at the top today, things aren't going so great. And the Ontario government is struggling to answer even simple questions and clear even fairly low bars of competency, especially after the Toronto Star reported this week that Ontario had ignored guidance from its own public-health officials when rolling out its new protocols, while refusing to be clear what guidance it did rely on. "It’s one thing to struggle to make a decision in a no-win scenario on the basis of conflicting expert advice," I wrote. "I sincerely feel for our elected officials, of every partisan persuasion, who really don’t have any good options at hand and must choose from a slate of bad ones, with lives hanging in the balance either way.
"But listening to expert advice and then not taking it requires, if nothing else, a compelling explanation. Thus far, none has been offered. The government told the [Toronto Star] only that its new protocols were 'informed by data, evidence and information, including from other jurisdictions, and approved by Cabinet.' 'Public health experts such as the Chief Medical Officer of Health, Office of the Chief Medical Officer of Health, Public Health Measures Table and local medical officers of health provided input on the overall concept and direction for the framework,' the Star was told.
"Ummm. Okay?"
Also at TVO.org, I wondered if one of the major causes of our crappy communications in this emergency has been the hollowing-out of my profession: "For reasons that are very complicated — but can perhaps be quickly summed up as 'we have run out of money because our advertising market has been obliterated' — modern media outlets are a shadow of their former selves. Many have closed down entirely. What this means is that you have fewer journalists covering larger areas. Torontonians may not realize how lucky they are to live in a city that still has a relatively robust media market. You do not need to drive far out of the city to discover that there’s virtually no local media on the ground. What local news-gathering and reporting resources there are are simply overwhelmed by the sheer volume of news coming out of Toronto.
"If you live in any one of the cities or towns in Toronto’s cottage country, for example, you might have a local weekly newspaper (a very few of you might still have a daily). You might have a couple of local radio stations that play some local news at the top of every hour before the music comes back. You may even be lucky enough to have one of the new digital journalism startups active in your community. (And, of course, you can always count on us here at TVO.org.)
"But almost all the news you will be getting will be coming out of Toronto — or possibly Ottawa or Windsor or some other local hub. With constantly changing terminology and varying directives being applied in different geographic regions, it is undoubtedly difficult for those who are not living in these larger cities to follow what rules apply to them locally."
Journalists, folks. We can be annoying sometimes, I know. But boy, will you ever miss us when we're gone.
And on that cheerful note, thanks for reading, as always. Please feel free to share this on your social feeds so I can keep vacuuming up new readers. And stick around. Now that I have time to write, things will be a bit busier here.
But for now, take care and be safe. Until next time.
mgurney.responses@gmail.com
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