Humanity should never be in short supply

The scenes from India are devastating.

Seen via BBC News video clips, a woman has been pulling her elderly husband around on a gurney for 10 hours, trying to find a hospital that will take him. They are full to overflowing.

Another woman clasps her 59-year-old mother’s bracelets in a plastic bag as the woman’s hastily assembled funeral pyre is lit. There is no time for ceremony or family gatherings.

Al Jazeera reports that social media is awash in pleas for oxygen and hospital beds.

The Canadian government is sending $10 million to India for ambulance services and personal protective equipment.

It’s human instinct to want to help when you see other people suffering, particularly when you know that other places are being overwhelmed by COVID-19.

And particularly when you know the same thing could happen anywhere, to any of us.

In Ontario, which recorded 3,480 new cases of COVID-19 on April 28, health-care officials are facing a grim dilemma.

CTV News reported that,

“As intensive care admissions climb to dangerously high levels in Ontario, health-care workers in the province worry they might soon be forced into the worst-case scenario of choosing who gets the best care and who doesn’t.”

Ontario has developed a triage protocol that will see patients labelled according to who has the best chance of survival, and once intensive-care units can no longer handle all of the sick people, it will have to be put into effect.

As CTV reporters Avis Favaro, Elizabeth St. Philip and Ben Cousins reported, “Under the triage protocols, all patients are assigned four colours — red, purple, yellow and green — depending on how doctors perceive a patient’s likelihood of surviving for another 12 months. Patients deemed red are predicted to have a 20 per cent chance of surviving for the year, while patients deemed in the green have more than a 70 per cent chance of surviving. Under this system, ICU beds would be given to the green patients first, followed by yellow, purple and red.”

Imagine knowing your grandparent, parent or partner was in the hospital having their chart red-labelled.

These are grave, desperate times.

Which is why I felt conflicted when Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia rejected a call from the Canadian Medical Association on April 16 to have vaccines in Canada diverted to where they were needed the most, rather than continue to distribute them on a per capita basis.

“When it comes to vaccines, it is only fair for the per capita model to continue,” N.L. Premier Andrew Furey said. “Given the dynamic nature of this pandemic, any province or territory could be in a serious situation at any point.”

He’s right about that, but it felt a bit against the grain not to help fellow Canadians who are in a worse situation than we are.

So I was proud this week to see a nine-member fully vaccinated medical team from Newfoundland and Labrador volunteer to help out in Ontario. They will be on the ground there for days and weeks, caring for COVID patients and giving respite to exhausted medical personnel.

The mantra during this pandemic that “we’re all in this together” has never really been true. COVID-19 has always hit certain people harder — the poor, people reliant on the gig economy, people with disabilities and those otherwise marginalized, women, Black, Indigenous people and people of colour.

But what is true is that we can only survive this pandemic by helping each other, even if that just means being vigilant about following public health rules.

As BBC News reporter Rebecca Morelle put it, “The situation in India is a bleak reminder that none of us will be safe until everyone is safe.”