Laying It Out: Medicine Hat capping off #BestSummerEver with 19 dead in 17 days

By Scott Schmidt on September 18, 2021.

They said it was over. They smugly made fun of anyone who said it wasn’t. They encouraged us to gather en masse. Now, deaths are spiking, hospitals are screwed and we still lead the country in dummies who think COVID isn’t real.

Every bit of this their fault, and yet every one of them is still collecting a publicly-paid-for salary. But, hey. They’re sorry about it.

Premier Jason Kenney, Health Minister Tyler Shandro, Dr. Deena Hinshaw and all the arrogant staff members who trotted out their fatally stupid “open for summer” plan are responsible for people dying, and they don’t even have the integrity to quit.

The embarrassment they bring to Alberta is overshadowed only by the death they have caused.

Their #BestSummerEver campaign — up to and very much including the second-stupidest hats ever made — is the kind of colossal failure that will be etched into history books for its complete disregard of widely available expertise, data and reason.

Warnings came from all over the province and beyond (including this column), telling the United Conservatives and their top doctor they were making a grave mistake by not only lifting all public health orders but also declaring the pandemic over and urging Albertans to party like it’s 2019.

They did it anyway, and this is their disaster.

Since lifting all health orders on July 1, another 222 Albertans have died. What’s truly terrifying is, 27 died in July, another 55 in August, and so far in September, 140 more human beings are dead.

The ICU situation across Alberta is so dire, we are now asking less insane provinces to take on our dying citizens, whom we no longer have space for. Surgeons are on standby to assist with intubations that they can’t even do because there aren’t any beds.

It’s an all out catastrophe they knew would happen. And I know they knew, because the exact same experts pleading with them to look at the proper data came right to media like myself when they were either ignored by the government, or discredited by it.

After blaming the entire third wave on vaccination procurement in Ottawa, the Alberta government (wrongly) suggested everything would be OK once we reach a 70% vaccination rate. Never mind the fact that plan was also ill-advised and wouldn’t have worked, they didn’t even execute it.

It’s Sept. 18 today, our vaccination rate is still just 61%, and these schmucks lifted everything 80 days ago.

Why are they still here?

Listen to how MLAs talk about this fourth wave. It’s almost as if a mandate has been issued to refer to this as the “wave of the unvaccinated,” because those words are being played on repeat.

While there is no doubt the vast majority dealing with serious COVID symptoms are unvaccinated, and even less doubt most are making a selfish mistake that only exists to prolong this pandemic, the UCP is using it as a copout.

As usual, they’re simply shifting blame.

What we have to remember is, (as written about here in the spring), what matters with viral spread is the R value, as in the number of people each COVID case will pass it on to. If the number is below 1.0, the pandemic slowly goes away, if it’s above 1.0, it ramps up.

It’s a simple calculation, and there was plenty of data available to Hinshaw et al in the spring on how that number works. And that data said, quite clearly, a 70% vaccine rate by itself would not get that number below 1.0. Period.

They knew they couldn’t lift all public health orders and just rely on vaccines, but instead they cherry-picked a small sample size of information from the United Kingdom that told them what they wanted to hear.

That’s pretty standard practice for governments when trying to sell a pipeline’s pipe-dream of never-ending jobs. You task some University of Calgary economist to tell everyone you’ve developed a “credible path” to the best possible scenario, and everyone acts like they’ve heard real analysis.

But using a strategy that is literally never accurate in reality is a pretty disgraceful way to sell the end of a pandemic, yet that’s exactly what they did. And now Albertans watch them stand up one by one and say, “Whoopsies.”

Sorry, but that’s not good enough. Kenney and Shandro refusing to take true responsibility is one thing, but you would hope our top doctor would understand the need to step down when this many people die on her mistake.

However, it does need to be said that just because all of Alberta tripped over Hinshaw’s foot when she stuck it out to toe the UCP’s anti-science line, doesn’t mean our own Cypress-Medicine Hat MLA Drew Barnes is doing you a service by taking the opposite approach.

The longtime local MLA and I might agree Kenney (and more) need to resign, but that’s where any alliance would end.

As bad as this premier has been for Alberta (before and during COVID), Barnes would be objectively worse. Nineteen Hatters died in the last 17 days of a pandemic he has downplayed from day one, and he chose to use his space in this paper this week to brag about opposing all action to stop it.

Neither local MLA has offered a single condolence to the growing number of families who lost loved ones, but at least Michaela Glasgo urges vaccinations and calls out hospital protesters for the complete zeroes they are.

Barnes, on the other hand, continues to push for doing nothing while people die, and will only speak about vaccines to remind you it’s your God-given right to not take one. Apparently we can’t be the “strongest and freest” unless we’re first the dumbest and deadest.

Yeehaw.

Maybe next week we can talk about his plan to deal with the hoards of dying citizens by privatizing hospital beds. We’ll call it, “For a modest fee, filthy rich independent MLA says people can have a place to die from entirely preventable disease because that’s what his constituents would want.”

It’s a working title.

Scott Schmidt is the layout editor for the Medicine Hat News. He can be reached at sschmidt@medicinehatnews.com

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