Heather Mallick: Are businesses worth more than human lives? In Doug Ford’s Ontario, the answer is yes

Thanks largely to Premier Doug Ford’s intransigence, Ontario COVID-19 cases are rising so fast that a moral catastrophe threatens, prefaced by a series of shocks. It’s not just that , a frightening number, but that it will trend far higher than hospitals’ capacity to care for patients.

As the Star has reported, within two weeks hospital intensive care units will likely see 150 COVID-19 patients, which means that non-emergency surgery for people with cancer, heart and other conditions will have to be delayed again. The backlog from the last delayed surgeries will not clear. It will build.

The modelling suggests there will be “at least 400 such patients requiring intensive care, which is above the level of 350 where officials have previously warned it becomes ‘virtually impossible’ to perform non-emergency surgeries.”

People will die because of these delays. Just as families were heartbroken by not being at a loved one’s side before or at the point of death, families will suffer even more not knowing if a stricken relative could have been saved. Their bitterness and sorrow will be extreme.

But another shock could follow. If hospitals are overrun with cases, they will have to ration care, judging which patients will get possibly life-saving care and which will be left to die. Normally, according to the rules of triage, the sickest patients are treated first.

With intensive care units overwhelmed, triage might change. A very ill patient might be advised to accept death while a younger or less stricken patient might still have a chance.

Here’s where the real pain begins: a patient might have COVID-19 because they had fewer life chances in the first place. They were poor, ill-nourished, unable to speak English well, worked in a public-facing job or a careless workplace. Or they might just be a bad bet because of age or mental health or other factors that were impossible to alter.

When people begin to die for that reason, families do not get over it. That’s when the rage begins, a permanent anger at inbuilt unfairness, at a government that thought a business’s health was worth more than human health. The obvious answer is to pay businesses to stay closed in a lockdown that lasts long enough to hack at terrible rates of illness.

This is not the Progressive Conservative government’s way, so much so that it initially quietly altered the numbers provided by science to the number preferred by the government. , Public Health Ontario had provided numbers for the threshold at which “red” control, the second-highest level of restrictions, would kick in. They were 25 cases per 100,000 people and a lab test positivity rate of 2.5 per cent.

. On Friday it backed down after public furor and set the numbers at 40 cases per 100,000 with a positivity rate over 2.5 per cent, placing Toronto, Hamilton and other regions in the red control zone. If it weren’t for good journalism …

, overseen by an ethics committee from a government agency, suggested that in the worst case emergency, those with less than a 75 per cent chance of survival should be denied medication and care by ventilator.

If that is untenable, many more . Is quality of life considered? Should it be? Would people be asked to volunteer, and could they feel pressured?

Here’s the most shocking part, which will arrive perhaps next year. All this terrible fear and pain is a rehearsal for what happens when a successful vaccine arrives. Who will get it first? Presumably health-care workers and those, like the elderly and ill, who are already more vulnerable to COVID-19.

But after that, the classifications become more difficult. If there aren’t enough vaccines — people in Toronto have found even flu vaccines difficult to obtain — how will they be distributed?

I assume it will be done fairly badly, given that it is almost impossible to do well. No decision will please everyone, or even smaller cohorts. The anger people will feel as they see others get the vaccine ahead of them will be extraordinary. What is worrying is that the rage might be permanent.

It will leave some people forever free from goodwill. Look at the anti-maskers, furious over a wee, temporary, harmless bit of cloth. See unmasked men glaring on the Toronto subway, itching to start a fight.

How will they feel when they finally realize that death is stepping into the bright light, and making its choices? I say “feel” because they won’t think. They will lash out against logic, science and moral codes.

Life ends. If we all rage against the dying of the light, imagine the rage against those whose light will not die, while yours very likely will.

Times like these might cause mass resentment and moral disintegration in a once-civil society. Next year will test us sorely.

Heather Mallick is a Toronto-based columnist covering current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: