Watching Vultures Circle Over Alberta’s Health Care
This is what it looks like when public goods collapse, and it’s not an accident.
This is the moment that we’ve been warned about since the beginning of the pandemic: when we don’t only have to worry about deaths from Covid-19, but also that no ICU beds will be available for someone arriving at the hospital from a car accident or with a heart attack. Until now, people who oppose pandemic restrictions have been increasing the mortality rate from Covid itself. Moving forward, they will also be increasing the mortality rate from almost everything else as hospitals start to turn patients away.
Hospitals in Alberta, strained beyond capacity, are about to be forced to enact a triage protocol for the first time in their operating history. That’s what you call it when you can’t provide the care that every patient needs, so you have to make tough calls about who to try to save and who gets turned away without care. Unless they’ve personally served with the military in a foreign war zone, the doctors about to face this nightmare haven’t ever experienced such a thing in their entire professional careers. On the heels of eighteen months of unprecedented trauma, it’s yet more additional trauma.
