Lessons not learned

You'd like to think society might have learned something from this plague. Something about how we value, or not, our elders.

The stats are stark. In Canada, the over 60 crowd makes up a mere twenty percent of cases, but we've got 70% of hospitalizations, and a whopping 97% of deaths! Generally speaking, those numbers reflect what's happened in other countries. This is a disease that picks off the elderly, and the more frail and sickly you are, the more likely you are to be picked off.

This fact has resulted in an inordinate amount of attention being focused on how we care for our elders. Too often, it is more realistic to describe our system of eldercare as warehousing rather than "caring for."

In the year since the panic began, much hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth has attended this topic. The truth is, we've allowed our eldercare infrastructure to be privatized. In many cases, nursing home chains are just another profit centre for a global corporation. The prevailing ethos in any for-profit enterprise these days seems to be, spending a dollar more on patient care means a dollar less in annual profits.

Paring the hours of PSWs to below full-time, instead of making this most essential front-line job full-time with benefits, helps the bottom line. As far as I can tell, there's been virtually nothing done to change this practice, even though multi-site part-time PSWs were a major transmission vector, a fact recognized early in the first wave.

Personal Support Worker needs to be a full-time job with proper benefits, whether they're working in a unionized government facility or anywhere else. If all our praise of heroic front-line workers is more than blah blah blah, things need to change.

And that would go a long way towards slowing down the next pandemic.