Category Archives: Health

Releasing the Young from their Handcuffs

Authoritarianism, Decline of the west, Health, Social Issues, Social Media

 

Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt is one of the most brilliant thinkers around. I first encountered him at Arizona State University where Chris and I have attended various lectures over the years during our winter stays.  I missed his lecture there by a couple of days, but thankfully got to hear his recorded lecture.

Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) joined New York University Stern School of Business in July 2011. He is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, based in the Business and Society Program. Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures––including the cultures of progressive, conservatives, and libertarians. I have been reading his articles and books for about 10 years and I still don’t know if he is a conservative or a liberal. I don’t think he is a socialist. He is an independent thinker. He wants to apply his research in social and moral psychology to help important institutions work better. Haidt has co-founded a variety of organizations and collaborations that apply moral and social psychology toward that end, including Heterodox Academy.org. He doesn’t like orthodoxies.

His most recent research is teen mental health and how that is related to political dysfunction. He notes that we have deep political dysfunction that current teens will be stuck with even though they did nothing to create it. This reminds me of climate change. Same problem. According to Haidt the older generations have effectively prevented the teens from gaining the capacity to deal with the problems the older generations created and passed on to the teens. That’s not very nice.

Haidt has said that,

“Childhood has become more tightly circumscribed in recent generations––with less opportunity for free, unstructured play; less unsupervised time outside; more time online. Whatever else the effects of these shifts, they have likely impeded the development of abilities needed for effective self-governance for many young adults. Unsupervised free play is nature’s way of teaching young mammals the skills they’ll need as adults, which for humans include the ability to cooperate, make and enforce rules, compromise, adjudicate conflicts, and accept defeat.”

 

The current adults have programmed the upcoming generation to fail, by bringing them up to be unable to think and act freely.  The new generation was forced to rely too much on their parents—the famous helicopter parents or even worse bulldozer parents. As a result, the teens are unable to learn how to deal with the world they have to face.

Haidt has learned a lot from an essay by an economist Steven Horwitz who argued that the loss of free play posed a serious threat to liberal societies because the upcoming generation has not learned the social skills needed to solve disputes.  They will have no chance  to solve them so will in all likelihood turn to authorities to resolve disputes that in turn will cause them to suffer “from a coarsening of social interaction” that could “create a world of more conflict and violence.”

Haidt has paid particular attention to the role of social media and its effects on these hapless teens. Here is how Haidt summarized his own research:

“And while social media has eroded the art of association throughout society, it may be leaving its deepest and most enduring marks on adolescents. A surge in rates of anxiety, depression and self-harm among American teens began suddenly in the early 2010s. (The same thing happened to Canadian and British teens, at the same time.) The cause is not known, but the timing points to social media as a substantial contributor—the surge began just as the large majority of American teens became daily users of the major platforms. Correlational and experimental studies back up connection to depression and anxiety, as do reports from young people themselves, and from Facebook’s own research, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.’

Haidt’s research showed a remarkable timing of youth attaching themselves to new social media and the rise of youth anxiety and depression.

This incapacity has been revealed most strikingly in university classes, though it is felt everywhere. Here is how Haidt described life for this generation at North American colleges:

Depression makes people less likely to want to engage with new people, ideas, and experiences. Anxiety makes new things seem more threatening. As these conditions have risen and as the lessons on nuanced social behavior learned through free play have been delayed, tolerance for diverse viewpoints and the ability to work out disputes have diminished among many young people. For example, university communities that could tolerate a range of speakers as recently as 2010, arguably began to lose that ability in subsequent years, as Gen Z began to arrive on campus. Attempts to disinvite visiting speakers rose. Students did not just say that they disagreed with visiting speakers; some said that those lectures would be dangerous, emotionally devastating, a form of violence. Because rates of teen depression and anxiety have continued to rise into the 2020s, we should expect these views to continue in the generations to follow, and indeed to become more severe.

 That is one reason hat Haidt urges governments to reduce the damaging effects of social media on adolescents by reducing its availability to them. He urges that they not be allowed onto social media platforms until they have reached at least the age of 16. He also says businesses must be compelled to enforce such regulations.

He thinks the most important thing we can do for them is to let them out to play. We should stop starving children of the vital experiences they most need to become good citizens and that is “free play.”  Not organized play much preferred by helicopter parents. He likes the laws established in Utah, Oklahoma, and Texas where free-range parenting laws help to assure parents that they won’t get into trouble for “neglecting” their children by allowing them to play freely. Kids should also be allowed to walk to school and play in groups as they used to do.

This could go a long way towards detoxifying social media for teens and adolescents.

A lot of people point to social media as the culprit. Haidt backs it up with solid science.

 

Are Prayerful Hopes Enough?

Decline of the west, Health, Social democracy, Social Issues, Social Media

 

The American Center for Disease Control and Prevention (‘CDC’) is respected widely around the world, though among right-wing science-denying Americans not so much. Perhaps they don’t like their reports for ideological reasons rather than scientific reasons.

The CDC has issued a vitally important report that these same right-wing opponents will also want to reject. The report was called the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (‘CDC Youth Risk Report). According to this report, teen girls in the US have experienced record levels of violence, sadness, and suicide risk in recent years.

The CDC Youth Risk Report also shone a spotlight on alarming statistics about young girls being forced into sex and harbouring serious thoughts of suicide. How is this possible in the greatest country in the world?

If the report is true, and I have heard no evidence-based critique of it, it is extremely important that American political leaders of all stripes not ignore it. Although more than 17,000 students participated in the report it was conducted in the fall of 2021 in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Naturally many children, no doubt more than normally the case, were anxious and feeling isolated.

Jonathan Haidt a social psychologist at New York University and a leader at  a laboratory on social psychology has shown the scientific data does not support the idea that the cause of this problem is the pandemic. The evidence clearly showed that this trend predated the pandemic and there was only a surprisingly minor blip during the pandemic.

I want to also say that this is not an American problem.  Haidt confirmed that the science is very similar for Canada and the UK.

Nonetheless, according to Debra Houry, the Chief Medical Officer for the CDC “the results are alarming.”

The CDC Youth Risk Report said that more than 40% of high school students had feelings of sadness or hopelessness “that prevented them from engaging in their regular activities for a least two weeks of the year.” That is nearly half!  Do we think nearly half were just trying to get an extended vacation?

 

I know some students in Canada who had such feelings and they were real. Interestingly, girls suffered more than boys with rates nearly double that of boys. 57% of girls and 29% of boys felt persistently sad or hopeless. Added to that, nearly 1 in 3 teenage girls considered attempting suicide! That was 60 percent higher than 10 years earlier!

 

Finally, 1 in 7 teen girls said they had at some point been forced to have sex and nearly 1 in 5 had experienced violence within the past year.

Some parents on hearing about this report said they were filled with “prayerful hope” that this was a mere “reflection of this pandemic uncertainty.”

Personally, I hope that Evangelical supporters of right-wing regimes across the US consider more than just prayerful hopes and pay some attention to the scientific data, even if it’s not perfect. Relying solely on such hopes could be dangerous for young people.

They really need more than prayerful hope!

What is driving our youth to suicide?

Alienation, Decline of the west, Health, Social Issues, Social Media

 

While it is shocking that suicide is now the leading cause of death among young Americans, and the rates are rising among young women faster than among young men, the important question of course, is ‘what is driving our youth to suicide?’  And following that, ‘what can we do about it?’

 

As is customary, answers are hard to find. Theories are more abundant. Some have looked at the role of social media exposure, particularly with the use of smartphones. Some evidence suggests that girls who have had a faster rise in depression rates are experiencing more cyber bullying.  Some suggest this is because they use smart phones more than boys and text more than boys. The social connections so created are generally believed by mental health professionals to be more problematic than traditional forms of communication.

Drugs and alcohol are another popular culprit proposed by theorists. But there was no significant increase in the their use by young people during the time that rates of depression and suicide rose.

Some theorists have suggested the black box warnings the American Food and Drug Administration imposed in 2004 on things like anti-depressants have been counter-productive. That warning suggested to young people that the drugs could trigger suicidal thoughts, thus of course discouraging their use, even when they would have been helpful. According to Richard Friedman, a psychiatrist writing in the New York Times, “Within two years of the F.D.A. advisory, antidepressant use dropped by 31 percent in teens and 24 percent in young adults. Although antidepressant use recovered somewhat after 2008, it has remained below levels that would have been expected based on prescribing patterns before the warnings appeared.”

Friedman claimed that we need not wait until we know all the causes. We known enough, he said, that we know various psychotherapies and medications can be helpful. That might be true.  I am more concerned that we need to look deeper into the causes of this mental health crisis among our youth. But ultimately I agree most with the following statement and question he made: “Every day, 16 young people die from suicide. What are we waiting for?”

I think our failure to look seriously at this problem is itself a sign of serious civilizational decline. If we can’t look seriously and thoughtfully at such a problem at which problems can we look seriously?

 

A Marshall Plan for Children

Decline of the west, Health, Social democracy, Social Issues, Social Media

 

I am hearing a lot about mental health of young people in the United States. The stats are depressing. No pun intended. Kids are dying from self-harm and drugs. This is a wicked problem.

I don’t know the stats for Canada, but I know from experience that they must be similar and can’t be good. In fact, Jonathan Haidt , an American social psychologist who studies problems like this empirically, has said that the same statistics prevail in both Canada and the UK, making clear that they evince a western problem not just an American problem.

Young people are suffering. And young people should not suffer. That job belongs to old people and we shouldn’t give it up without a fight.

Kids  are dying in huge numbers on account of suicide and drugs. More than ever before.  One would think this would call for action–sort of like a war effort.

A good friend of mine actually knows something about the subject. Unlike me. He worked for many years in Brooklyn as nurse with indigent children and has decades of experience.  He tells me this problem is not a new one. People were just not paying attention. When he received  an award for New York City employees way back in 1992 he called for “a Marshall plan for children” in the city.  Actually, one is needed for the entire country and Canada too. “Unsurprisingly,” he said, “no such plan was forthcoming.”  He called the region where he worked with neo-natal children “a health care war zone.”  But as he pointed out, shoutouts from neonatal nurse practitioners don’t usually trigger changes in public policy like complaints by political leaders of western democracies.

Problems with the heath of young people in America, the richest country in the world, have been well known for decades but little or nothing was done until Joe Biden put the child tax credit into effect during his first year in office and this reduced poverty among children by an astounding 50% in 2021, but characteristically, when the Republicans took over control of the American House of Representatives they acted quickly to get rid of that ‘unnecessary’ expense. Tax cuts for rich people are important. What are poor children worth?  Republicans, including the 80% of Evangelicals who support them, care about “children” in the womb, but  outside the womb not so much.

Frankly, my friend is understandably pessimistic that things will ever improve. I hope he is wrong. I fear he is right. We seem to be doomed.

 

 

Youth Suicides

Decline of the west, Health, Social Issues

 

Suicide is now the leading cause of death for young people in America. That should be shocking.

 

Another aspect of this trend of rising suicides among young people in the United States is that data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC’) indicate that for the first time the rates of suicide for young females has been increasing faster than the rate for young males. The overall rate is still higher for young males, but the young women and girls are making serious efforts to catch up with the males. Why is that?

 

Psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman writing in the New York Times pointed to the connection between depression and youth suicides. As suicide rates were rising, so were rates of teen depression. The rate of teen depression recently rose by 63%! As Friedman reported, “In 2017, 13 percent of teens reported at least one episode of depression in the past year, compared with 8 percent of teens in 2007, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.”

 

Friedman found this trend particularly disturbing because “we know perfectly well how to treat this illness.” I am not actually as confident that our health care professionals know what to do, but nonetheless his comments are relevant.  We should be doing better to help the teens. As he asked, “If thousands of teens were dying from a new infectious disease or a heart ailment, there would be a public outcry and a national call to action.”

 

The fact is that young people may be physically healthy, but they are, as he says, “psychiatrically vulnerable.” Three-quarters of all the mental illness that we see in adults has already occurred by age 25. Our collective failure to act in the face of this epidemic is all the more puzzling since we are living at a time when people are generally more accepting of mental illness and stigma is on the wane.” Once more let me add, that I am not as confident as he is that we are doing such a great job in helping to eliminate stigma as he suggests, but at least we have made efforts in that direction that until recently we could not claim.

It is fairly clear that our young people are not getting the treatment they should. As Friedman said, “Only 45 percent of teenage girls who had an episode of depression in 2019 received any treatment, and just 33 percent of teenage boys with depression did. In contrast, two-thirds of adults with a recent episode of depression received treatment.” That suggests this serious problem is not being addressed.

Mental illness is always a serious problem, but when it is youth that are suffering it is even more disturbing and I think suggest a serious decline in the nation.

 

A stealth Enemy: Air Quality

Climate change, Environment, Environmental Apocalypse, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Pollution

 

In early 2020 the world changed–we experienced Covid-19. This was something new an international pandemic that hit home to everyone except the most obtuse virus deniers, religious fanatics, anti-science cranks, and conservatives and their fellow travelers.

Covid-19 was big. It changed the world. In many respects the world changed including massive economic slow-downs or even lockdowns. For more than a year we were required to wear masks in most social settings. Many of us were not able to work. An international Marshall plan was established to work on vaccines. Millions of people died while millions of people denied the reality of their illness or the efficacy of the vaccines created to stem the tide. Yes, the world was different.

In the midst of this pandemic and the international response it was difficult to see anything else. As a result, we missed some pretty important things. For example, few paid attention to air quality. That was a mistake.

Rebecca Solnit was the first to draw my attention to this disturbing fact. As she reported in The Guardian,

“While Covid ravaged across the world, air pollution killed about three times as many people. We must fight the climate crisis with the same urgency with which we confronted coronavirus.”

  

I was shocked to read that. It couldn’t be true. Could it?

After all at the time she wrote, 2.8 million people had died as a result of Covid-19 and it captured our entire attention. Whether we believed it or not, clearly covid-19 was the issue. Since then of course, millions more have died, and we are nowhere need done with this pandemic.

What most of us did not know is that during the first 15 months of the pandemic that Solnit was writing about “3 times as many people died from air pollution.”

While Covid ravaged across the world, air pollution killed about three times as many people. We must fight the climate crisis with the same urgency with which we confronted coronavirus.

 

According to a recent scientific study, 8.7 million people per year die of the effects of air pollution. And part of the problem is that most of us are unaware of this disturbing fact. Air pollution is a largely invisible enemy unless you visit some place like Phoenix Arizona as I did for nearly 10 years in a row. You can see it there. Air pollution usually arrives by stealth. As a result, unlike Covid-19 the world has not rallied to defeat it. There have been no lockdowns or mask requirements because of air pollution. Largely this stealth attack has gone unnoticed and unquestioned.  We have normalized the havoc by treating it as what Solnit called “moral background noise.” Instead Covid-19 gets all the attention. Solnit says we should treat air pollution like an emergency, like we have done with Covid-19. She does not say attention to Covid-19 was misplaced.

The first thing we must realize is that there is more than one serious consequence to burning fossil fuels.  We must also recognize that  climate change is not the only serious effect of our determination to burn fossil fuels. Climate change is a serious problem, perhaps the most serious in the world right now, notwithstanding Covid-19, but so is air quality.  The problem is that burning fossils fuels is to deep a part of the status quo that we don’t really see it. We are blind to it and have come to believe there is no reasonable alternative.

As Solnit said,

“We are designed to respond with alarm to something that just happened, that breaches norms, but not to things that have been going on for decades or centuries. The first task of most human rights and environmental movements is to make the invisible visible and to make what has long been accepted unacceptable. This has of course been done to some extent, with coal-burning power plants and with fracking in some places, but not with the overall causes of climate chaos.”

 

We cannot let this stealth bomber slip under the radar.  Climate change creates similar problems as until we experience dramatic effects as when wild fires consume British Columbia and California forests, or ice bergs break off continents, birds disappear, or in my case, beautiful flowers come earlier in spring, we often fail to take note of the serious changes. It is also difficult to notice when some of the richest and most predatory corporations in the world pay huge sums of money to pundits for hire to confuse the science and persuade these problems are not real.

We must be alert to these problems and the consequences they foist on us. We must dissent from the normal. We must resist the fake reality that predatory capitalist firms try to impose upon us.  As Solnit said,

“According to CNBC, at the outset of the pandemic, “New Delhi recorded a 60% fall of PM2.5 from 2019 levels, Seoul registered a 54% drop, while the fall in China’s Wuhan came in at 44%.” Returning to normal means drowning out the birds and blurring out the mountains and accepting 8.7 million air pollution deaths a year. Those deaths have been normalized; they need to be denormalized.”

Solnit also reminded us that,

 

“A lot of attention was paid to whatever actions might have caused Covid-19 to cross from animals to humans, but the actions that take fossil fuel out of the ground to produce that pollution that kills 8.7 million annually, along with acidifying oceans and climate chaos, should be considered far more outrageous a transgression against public health and safety.”

 

One of the excuses these corporations have tried to get us to believe is that we can’t afford to change. One thing Covid-19 has showed us is that we can afford to spend the money that it takes to fight off disaster. Hugely impactful changes require huge responses. We can do it. We must. We must not tolerate a “normal” that costs the lives of 8.7 million people every year (in addition to all the other horrific effects of fossil fuel consumption.

Rebecca Solnit left us with some hope in her important essay:

“My hope for a post-pandemic world is that the old excuses for doing nothing about climate – that it is impossible to change the status quo and too expensive to do so – have been stripped away. In response to the pandemic, we in the US have spent trillions of dollars and changed how we live and work. We need the will to do the same for the climate crisis… With a drawdown on carbon emissions and a move toward cleaner power, we could have a world with more birdsong and views of mountains and fewer pollution deaths. But first we have to recognize both the problem and the possibilities.”

 

We need to get serious about climate change and air pollution and stop ignoring the problem or paying lip service to them as we have been doing in Canada. It is time for change. It is time to realize that this is not a future problem—this is happening now. This is apocalypse now.

Dying or Thinking: Health authorities’ “Agenda”

Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, reason, The Sleep of Reason, Truth Seeking

 

CBS Morning show recently filmed a man in a Louisiana hospital bed recovering from Covid-19.  If I did not know better I would have thought he was in Boundary Trails Hospital l between Winkler and Morden. After a lengthy stay in the hospital as a result of Covid-19, he was about to get out of hospital but still he said he would not get a vaccine. The interviewer asked him why and he responded, he did not want the government to “shove it down his throat.”  When asked what they were shoving down his throat , he said the local, state, and federal governments were all trying to shove it down his throat. The interviewer asked, “what are they shoving the science?’  The patient answered “No they are shoving the fact that this is their agenda. The agenda is to get me vaccinated.” What is so remarkable about this is that he was dead right (not dead yet, but right).  Public health officials do want to get him vaccinated to protect the public, including him.

Excuse the naughty words, but as John Oliver responded to this interview,

“public health officials agenda is to get you vaccinated. And you know what Covid’s agenda is?  To fucking kill you! To burrow into your body, into your hot little mouth, fuck around with your body, flip your nostrils off, make soup taste more like nothing than it already does and then kill you!”

 

Why is no one worried about that agenda?  Because Covid -19 is not the government. And that makes all the difference. Such people don’t trust anything that comes from the government, even if it will save their life.

People like that will never be persuaded.

The vaccine is doing its job. Nearly 100% of patients in hospital beds for Covid-19 are now unvaccinated. It is not perfect. There are some breakthrough cases. But the success rate is astonishingly good and the side effects are surprisingly low. Frankly, for most of us there is no good reason not to take the vaccine and a lot of good ones to take it.

As Bertrand Russell said, “Most people would rather die than think. And most people do.”

 

Anti-vax Insanity

Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Politics & Religion, reason, The Sleep of Reason, Trump

 

Charles M. Blow of the New York Times has written about unreason in relation of vaccines. He also saw that part of the reason for vaccine hesitancy could be explained by reference to their holder’s political beliefs. Unfortunately, in the United States and Canada, Covid-19 has become a hot political issue. This started when Conservatives asserted that they did not believe Covid-19 was real.  This movement was led by Donald Trump the President of the United States who originally said ‘Covid is a hoax’. He believed and convinced many of his followers that left wing liberals were trying to make him look bad and were trying to interfere with their freedoms. As a result, astonishingly, the richest country in the world became the largest victim of covid-19.

Blow summed up the history this way:

“Nothing better exemplifies the gaping political divide in this country than our embarrassing and asinine vaccine response. Donald Trump’s scorched earth political strategy has fooled millions of Americans into flirting with death. And now thousands are once again dying for it.

Almost from the beginning, efforts to combat the virus were met with disdain from a president who felt the crisis made him look bad. The science was denied. We came to live in a world where masking was mocked and ingesting disinfectant was offered up as a possible cure.”

 

This is what a world messed up by politics looks like. Every day I hear stories about people who refused to take the vaccine for the feeblest of reasons. Repeatedly people distrust physicians and government officials in favour of something they have “learned” from the Internet or their friends. How can that be?

Blow recognized that religion brought with it unreason in its trail. And that was not a pretty sight:

“The optics of countless socially distanced funerals is less offensive to those conservatives than the optics of being socially distanced in a Fuddruckers.

It was all lunacy. It is all lunacy. This should never have happened. There are people dead today — a lot of them! — who should still be alive and who would be if people in the heights of government and the heights of the media had not fed them lies about the virus.”

 

 

The result of course is frequently disastrous. As Blow concluded,

So, we have a situation in America where people are dying and will continue to die of ignorance and stubbornness. They are determined to prove that they are right even if it puts them on the wrong side of a eulogy. This is like watching millions of people playing in traffic.“

 

As Goya said,” the sleep of reason brings forth monsters.” What else can one expect?

We Should Celebrate Vaccines

Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, The Sleep of Reason

 

I heard Dr. Sanjay Gupta on the Late Show earlier this week. Dr. Gupta pointed out that

“vaccines are 90% effective. I don’t think we can celebrate that enough. They were developed so fast and are so effective, it will fundamentally change science. It will change the pace of medical innovation. Those mRNA vaccines may be therapies for cancer in the future.”

 

And yet astonishingly, many people don’t trust them! Not only that, they don’t even want to take them. They are turning their backs on one of the wonders of science! Instead, people turn to ignorant friends for medical advice. They listen to friends who get their information from dubious sources on the Internet instead of these astounding scientists who have been working their hearts out to help us. How can this be?

Vaccines are one of the greatest wonders of modern science. In the 19th century 95% of all people died from infectious diseases. Now in the 21st century only 5% of people die from infectious diseases.  Vaccines are one of the main reasons that people in the 20th century lived twice as much longer as those in the 19th century. And this is mainly because of vaccines.

And yet so many people distrust them. How can this possibly be the case?

I remember when I was a very young lad in the 1950s  polio was the infectious disease that scared everyone. There was a man living down the street from us, half a block away. He contracted polio.  We feared that like so many others he would have to live in an ‘iron lung’ for the rest of his life.  Many patients died. I remember when the polio vaccine was developed and I could hardly wait to get it. It was new technology, like the Covid-19 vaccines, but we all wanted it immediately.

After the introduction of polio vaccines the illness has been virtually eliminated. The last person in the US who contracted the illness naturally died in 1979.

Sadly, many people today don’t believe in the vaccines. They think they are risky.  Some are waiting for the rest of us to take them and test them out like guinea pigs. They want us to blaze a trail for them before they take them.

Many people were surprised at how quickly scientists discovered vaccines for Covid-19. I know I was one of them. But there were things I did not know. Scientists have been working on the mRNA vaccines for about 10 years. This was not magical new technology.

Anti-vaxxers used to warn us that vaccines were very dangerous because they required insertion of the virus into our bodies to generate an immune response. That does sound risky doesn’t it?  These technologies don’t do that, they “teach” our cells how to make the proteins that will trigger an immune response to the new coronavirus SARS- CoV-2.  They don’t require the insertion of the virus into our bodies. Anti-vaxxers should be rejoicing! Then our own bodies make the anti-bodies to recognize the virus when it appears in our bodies at a future time.

We should rejoice that we have so many smart scientists to develop vaccines. We should trust them.

 

Health: Sometimes you have to Spend money to save Money

Health, Social democracy

 

I have learned a few things about our healthy system. Not many I know. First, it is a wonderful system. If you are sick our health care professionals can help. Not always, but often. And the workers are kind, dedicated, caring, and professional. Just what you need if you are sick. I know this from personal experience in a stressful time.

But there is room for improvement too. I have just gone for my 3rd Covid-19 test. And as I write this I am waiting for the results. Do I have a cold or Covid-19? We’ll see.

Yesterday, I was told because of the symptoms we had, Chris and I should go for a Covid-19 test. So we immediately, tried to make an appointment for the test. Thankfully, in Steinbach we can make appointments. A friend of mine in Winnipeg stood in line (yes you heard that right, she stood in line) for about 3 hours waiting for her test. No appointments? Why can’t they make appointments in Winnipeg? Can you imagine how many people can’t stand for 3 hours? How many people gave up in frustration long before they reached the end of the line? How many people did not get tests that they should have got? How many other people were then exposed to these untested individuals who should have been tested?

Why do people who walk rather than drive have to wait so long? Is this because the walk-in tests are given where mainly poor people live? Where many indigenous people live? Are they not important too?

 

For me trying to make an appointment was a very annoying process. They have so few telephone lines that you must phone over and over again after hearing annoying recorded messages. I don’t know how many times Chris and I called. We were both phoning repeatedly. Each time we had to listen to at least part of an annoying recorded message. I know the first time I tried to get a test a few months ago. I found the message very confusing. Again I almost gave up. How many people give up and don’t get tested when they should?

Eventually we got through and made an appointment. Even with the appointment we had to wait in line for about half an hour after waiting a few hours for the appointment. I considered that a reasonable delay. It is not easy to schedule appointments for an entire day and have them all align perfectly.

But why does the province not hire more people to take the calls? Why does the province not hire and train more people to administer the tests? I know not anyone could do the jobs, but surely it would not take that long to train people to administer a simple nasal swab. It should not take a highly trained health care professional.

 

We are experiencing high unemployment in Manitoba. Most of these people are being paid by the government not to work. I am glad they are getting paid. Yet, I know most people would rather work than receive a cheque not to work. In Canadian society jobs give us meaning and a sense of worth. That is why people want to work. At least until they become old like me and believe they have worked long enough. So why don’t we hire people who don’t have jobs to do these jobs? Then phone calls could be handled all day and all night. Why don’t we keep the offices open as long as it takes to get it done promptly? The same goes for administering the tests in a lab. That might be trickier but surely it could be done if we used a little ingenuity. In Manitoba we have been in this pandemic for more than 6 months, why have we not arranged for this by now?

It is important that people get tested quickly. It is important that the test results are available quickly. Not just for me. I am not that important. For others. So if necessary people who contacted me can be told to get tested and also self-isolate sooner rather than later.

Now I am waiting for my test results. This is already more than 48 hours after my test was taken. This is nearly 60 hours since I was notified to get a test. When the test results come, and if I am positive, they will want to contact trace. By the time the professionals come to see me to do that I will likely have forgotten at least some of the people I contacted. After all it is so long ago, and I have trouble remembering whom I saw in the last hour. And I have been staying isolated at home. That means some people who should be tested won’t be tested and will continue to contact other people.

The same reasoning applies to schools. Why don’t we hire more unemployed teachers? I think there are lots of them around. I know some of them who can’t find a job. Why don’t we hire more janitors and maintenance people and keep schools open 18 hours a day? Or more? Then we can have smaller class sizes. Then everyone in those schools, including my precious grand daughters can be safer. The staff and teachers can be safer because they will be able to stay socially distant? Then there will be less community spread and we will all be safer, even those of us who have no direct contact with schools. I think this makes sense.

I know this costs money, but the investment is worth it. Our conservative government likes to avoid spending tax money. But sometimes that is foolish. If we do a better job of this business people can go back to work sooner. Then we can all pay them less assistance. Businesses can avoid bankruptcy. Our economy can grow. Sometimes we have to spend money to save money. That is called an investment.

Imagine too how people can live better and safer lives! This is not just about money.

Doesn’t this make more sense than opening bars and restaurants without social distance requirements?