Protect our Province BC along with several other medical professionals, scientists, and academics are extremely concerned about misinformation spread by Dr. Patricia Daly, Chief Medical Officer of Health for Vancouver Coastal Health.
This is the first time I have ever written a letter to my MLA. As a constituent who is a healthcare professional, a parent, and a recent cancer survivor, I feel compelled to reach out after the removal of mask mandates in BC hospitals, and I ask you, as my elected representative, to hear and, I hope, understand how serious this issue is, and how urgently change is needed in our provincial government’s pandemic management strategy.
Our health officer has previously advocated for kindness. But as someone with a disability (long Covid), I need you to know that resting under this rubric of “personal choice”, many of us who are disabled actually experience this framing of the matter as a personal choice, rather, as your government’s complete and abject disregard of the disabled and elderly, for how else are we to understand why our lives and health don’t matter?
Now is not the time to remove indoor masks protections in spaces where vulnerable British Columbians seek medical care. No one should come to the hospital for one condition and leave with a COVID-19 infection. Or, not leave the hospital, and die from Covid? A recent leak from the Victorian Health Department, Australia suggested a 10% or more mortality for patients who acquired COVID-19 in hospital between January and October 2022.
B.C.’s Provincial Health Officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, her medical health officers, Minister of Health Adrian Dix, and his health ministry have never warned you about post Covid health impacts beyond an acute infection. They’ve never told you about the chronic debilitating medical condition that can affect every organ in the body, including your heart, lungs, pancreas, kidneys, brain, gut, blood vessels and more. But they’ve all known about these harms for three years.
Elected officials in Ontario and New Brunswick have put forth private members’ bills for legislation that would require improved indoor air quality in all workplaces and public spaces.
Protect our Province BC has provided a draft letter that you can customize to send to your MLA demanding that they bring forward or support a similar bill here in BC.
“Even if the pandemic virus spread were to stop today, we still have tens of millions of people suffering Long Covid and that’s a parallel pandemic that is happening, which is getting a lot less attention than the acute and severe Covid, even though the cost to lives and the quality of lives that these people have to live with are very limited.” — Professor Akiko Iwasaki, Yale Immunologist, Long Covid Researcher and Advocate
Dr. Rae Duncan, UK Cardiologist and Long Covid researcher, shares her thoughts on how schoolchildren are not being adequately protected from COVID-19 infections and their health impact.
Being a family physician is always challenging. It has become even more challenging during the ongoing COVID pandemic, which is now compounded by a seasonal flu epidemic and the multiple other viruses circulating in our community. Here is a glimpse of what my days in the office have been like recently.
Share This “A true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.”Mahatma Ghandi At the September 28th BC Covid update, BC Health Minister Adrian Dix announced that in order to increase the in-hospital capacity with 1500 surge beds for impending COVID and influenza cases, patients would be “decanted”… Continue reading The Most Vulnerable People in B.C.