People are remembering COVID this week.
Well they should for lots of reasons as we will no doubt return to something in the next week or two.
The big take-away people should remember is that they, the ordinary folk of the province, responded to COVID with exactly the same thinking that they took to Muskrat Falls. If you don’t understand what that means, keep your eye peeled for the explainer around the middle of April. That’s the anniversary of an auspicious moment in the first lockdown. we’ll also get back to overall management, the lingering impacts on the healthcare system in the province, and we’ll talk about the deaths caused by cock-ups in health care management during the pandemic.
For now, let’s remember that the government’s first act, contrary to *all* expert advice was to shut schools, thereby creating a massive strain on the province’s health care system. After all, their parents the health workers all had to find ways of looking after their children and get ready for what might have been a severely stressed health system had the government not decided to shut it down as well for two and a half months.
But that happened later.
That first order went against *every* piece of emergency management advice, including the stuff for the anticipated pandemic.
Later on, the government closed the province to non-residents based *solely* on bogus reports of “tourists” from a handful of people, including most prominently the locally popular but cringe-inducing mayor of Bonavista (a future Liberal candidate??) in a CBC story that was long on hysteria and short of facts.
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From Bond’s COVID series…
But right after closing the schools, the province declared an emergency and the chief medical officer cut the province off from food, water, medical supplies, and the like *and* for good measure included any way to get to the province or from here.
It took a few hours but someone outside government pointed out what the CMO had done and they issued a revised order.
For your Friday enjoyment before a long weekend for government employees, here’s the post about that CMO fiasco from the old Bond Papers on March 23.
On Friday, Premier Dwight Ball took a question from reporters about the Liberal leadership that is still underway.
In a moment of egotistical boasting, Ball said it “takes experience to get through this crisis that we're dealing with. Someone said to me this morning it takes experience to do that job, and not often do you see a card on the back of a fire truck saying 'Novice Driver’”.
On Friday, the provincial government issued an order under the Public Health Protection and Promotion Act that directed individuals entering Newfoundland and Labrador from out of the province – either originating or returning – to enter a mandatory period of isolation for 14 days regardless of whether they were exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19 or not.
Problem: The Friday order, as written, effectively shut down the provincial economy and cut the province off from supplies of food and fuel. The order said:
All individuals arriving in Newfoundland and Labrador from outside the province must self-isolate for 14 days, including those individuals arriving from other provinces and territories in Canada.
The original order applied to *everyone*:
crews on Marine Atlantic ferries,
tanker crews, including the folks coming to Come by Chance and the refinery,
OCEANEX crews and other shipping companies that bring food, fuel, and essential supplies into the province,
people who work on one side of the border in Labrador and live on the other,
people involved in supplying electricity to the province,
crews working on and supplying the offshore platforms,
medical personnel arriving to help treat patients or back-fill positions,
airline crews and passengers of all kinds,
helicopter crews servicing the offshore rigs, which are outside the three-mile limit that is the province's jurisdiction, and
truck drivers who bring everything and anything into the province and who take manufactured goods out again.
No one in the provincial government, least of all the people who wrote up the order or the ones who approved it, realized what they were doing.
And so, after some uncertainty in the world outside government and a bunch of frantic calls and emails, the provincial government issued a second order the next day exempting all those people needed to keep the province running and keep people fed.
Someone check for a Novice Premier sign on the back of Dwight's car.
Monday: The latest provincial polls, the few days of the winter sitting of the legislature, and the guv’mint’s decision to shut the House of Assembly prematurely before the budget.
Wednesday: The Telegram and the future of local journalism.
Friday: Umberto Ecco and the perils of social media… from 1983
????: Canadian defence policy, the Ukraine, and the Trudeau Liberals
????: The budget… lingering issues