Page - 8 - in VULNERABLE - The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19

VULNERABLE8 governments have provided significant funding to support affected businesses and employees. Canadians have largely accepted this middle-way approach, and to date, the hospital system has not been overrun. There have been, however, significant provincial variations in infection rates. British Columbia, which acted the fastest amongst Canadian prov- inces in response to the outbreak, has for the moment succeeded in stemming what appeared initially to be a rather aggressive spread of the virus, using measures assessed as relatively “stringent” by the Oxford Stringency Index, developed to monitor country policies in response to the pandemic.29 By contrast, infection and death rates in Quebec and Ontario remain high for reasons not yet fully understood although, as discussed earlier, outbreaks have been strongly corre- lated with socio-economic deprivation. Across Canada, the vast preponderance of deaths (82%) have been associated with overrun long-term care institutions, with accounts of personal support workers forced to abandon their jobs for fear of the disease and for the health of their own families, sometimes leaving the frail elderly dehydrated, hungry, covered in feces, and in rare cases, left for dead. The military was called in to assist in Quebec and Ontario,30 and in both cases, has issued devastating reports on the conditions they found.31 Thus, while the Canadian approach has been successful to date in fending off an unmanageable surge in hospitals, a myopic focus on hospitals left long-term care homes and similar institutions exposed. As infection rates have begun to drop, some countries are begin- ning to lift these measures, some gradually and others more quickly. 29. Brandon Tang, Sara Allin & Greg Marchidon, “British Columbia’s Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic” (25 April 2020), online (blog): Cambridge  Core  -  HEPL  Blog  Series <https://www.cambridge.org/core/blog/2020/04/25/british- columbias-response-to-the-coronavirus-pandemic>; Natalie Obiko Pearson, “Behind North America’s Lowest Death Rate: A Doctor Who Fought Ebola”, Bloomberg  News (16 May 2020), online: <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/ articles/2020-05-16/a-virus-epicenter-that-wasn-t-how-one-region-stemmed-the- deaths>. For the stringency index, see Oxford University, “Coronavirus Govern- ment Response Tracker” (last visited 13 May 2020), online: Blavatnik School of Government <https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research-projects/coronavirus- government-response-tracker>. 30. “Long-Term Care COVID-19 Tracker” (last visited 13 May 2020), online: National Institute  on  Ageing <https://ltc-covid19-tracker.ca/>. 31. For Quebec, letter from Colonel T M Arsenault, and for Ontario, letter from Brigadier General C J A Mialkowski, both letters dated 19 May 2020 and on file with the authors.