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The Overview of lessons learned from COVID-19operational review of the provincial government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, was presented to Public Safety Minister and Solicitor General Mike Farnworth on September 23.
It wasn’t published until Friday afternoon, the time of week when disturbing reports are traditionally made public in the hope that no one will notice.
No chance. It is too important to be left as a dust collector on some filing shelf. Lessons is a very useful history of the first two years of the pandemic. It is also an indictment of the lessons the Horgan/Eby government refused to learn.
Written by three former civil servants, Lessons uses a classic form of the bad news message. I taught business writing for 40 years, and bad news was a key lesson.
The idea, I told my students, is to use the way we read in English. We focus most sharply on the beginning and end of sentences, paragraphs, and entire documents. This is where you put the strongest words and phrases to get your message across. We might read the average stuff, but not with the same emotional investment, and we don’t react as strongly to it.
So the bad news message, I told my students, needed some insulation. Start with something positive or at least neutral: Thank you for coming for an interview. It was a pleasure to meet you. Then deliver the bad news: The position you interviewed for is already filled by someone who better meets our needs. Then end with something positive or neutral: We will keep your CV on file for any future vacancies.
The praise-blame-praise formula
I don’t know if my students actually followed my advice in their careers, but the authors of the report certainly learned the same lesson and applied the principle when writing it.
So the executive summary (which is all most people read in a long report) opens with praise: “Overall, despite the unpreparedness of a province-wide emergency, the British Columbia government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been strong, showing resilience, balance and agility that should give British Columbians confidence in their ability to respond to future emergencies across the province.
In a bulleted list of findings, the summary repeats the formula with “universal support” and “strong praise” for some items, before gently mentioning “communications concerns” and “the importance of strong relationships with stakeholders,” “gaps” in provincial government programs’ and ending with ‘the challenge of implementing public health orders’.
The formula continues with each of the summary sections—public trust, compensation, decision-making, communications, implementation, and local impacts.
The summary concluded: “BC had a strong and effective response to the pandemic, which bodes well for its ability to respond effectively to the next event. Government and society came together to do what needed to be done. The government was nimble and resilient.”
Lessons is a very competent report in many respects.
A timeline of COVID-19 is useful for sorting out the jumble of events since the first cases were reported in Wuhan, China on December 31, 2019.
The analysis of inter-agency friction sheds light on behind-the-scenes issues rarely mentioned by the duo of provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry and health minister Adrian Dix.
I get stuck on “good, calm, safe”
Much of the success and failure of BC’s response has been due to government communication and the lack of it. The report praised Dix and Henry’s approach as “calm, competent and apolitical” and “very effective in allaying public fears”. Henry in particular became a celebrity, and her catchphrase became a local catchphrase: “Be good, be calm, be safe.”
But as the pandemic unfolded, her approach didn’t change. “Subsequent communications breakdowns,” the report said, “contributed to the erosion of trust.” Whenever events took a turn for the worse, Henry dismissed them as a ‘challenge’. As the entire planet struggled with one new strain after another, Henry always assured us that we were “in a good place.”
As we began to learn more about the virus and how to protect ourselves, Henry and Deeks seemed slow to grasp the new findings and explain them to the public.
As a result, the report said: “Over time, changes in public health guidelines and orders have been interpreted by many as evidence of incompetence or a lack of reliability.”
What the report doesn’t say
For all its strengths, Lessons there are some glaring omissions. Charlie Smith, former editor of Georgia Straight, posted results on his Substack from a word search he did on the Lessons Learned report: not once did he mention terms like “airborne,” “brain injury,” “cardiovascular,” and “excess mortality.” “Long COVID” is mentioned in passing.
Yet we’ve long known that COVID-19 is an airborne cardiovascular disease that causes brain damage and other effects in people who contract even “mild” cases. (I might add that the report, like the government, uses “restrictions”, a pejorative term, when “protections” would be more accurate.)
A lack of transparency, the report says, has led to poor explanations for policy changes, as well as limitations in the data provided. The information was kept from the public for reasons of privacy and stigmatization.
Sometimes this was necessary: “People can be stigmatized if their privacy is compromised. The Cowichan tribes and other First Nations experienced this with racist attacks after outbreaks were discovered in their communities.
But sometimes important information is buried deep in some government websites.
To find up-to-date data on the pandemic, for example, you should first go to the British Columbia Center for Disease Control and click on COVID-19. Scroll down to “Data” and click again, where you’ll find mostly archived material.
To see information like current dashboard numbers, click on Respiratory Diseases and you’ll find the dashboard, the latest situation and weekly reports, and even a mortality page showing that COVID-19 is the fifth leading cause of death in BC this year.
These pages require more digging than most people are willing to do, assuming they even know where to start. So, when we turn to the public input part of the report, it is not surprising that the public and many civil servants were very irritated by the government’s communication failures.
“This part of the report,” the authors explain, “summarizes input gathered from the public through a survey, from the government through written internal assessments prepared by ministries and agencies, as well as interviews with senior government officials, and from input gathered from stakeholders through interviews and written opinions. We also engaged with local people and organisations.’
In other words, they heard not only from the public, but also from government departments, health unions and municipal and local governments – the people directly involved in implementing government orders.
“Extreme vitriol”
The authors make it clear that their study is not representative of the entire population. They note that an opinion poll shows that 60 to 70 percent of us are satisfied with the government’s response. “In our survey,” they tell us, “less than 20 percent agree that the government has done a good job.”
They also report two important themes in their survey responses:
- The majority of respondents wanted a review of the actual decisions made in response to the pandemic, which was beyond the scope of this review.
- The sheer level of malice directed at decision makers by many respondents was shocking.
Many respondents, the authors wrote, cited the World Economic Forum, Big Pharma and “secret government programs” and complained about the loss of their freedom and Charter rights due to government action.
Sometimes the survey responses were evenly split. For example, respondents appeared to be evenly split on whether it was “easy to find government COVID-19 information.”
And sometimes the answers were overwhelmingly negative.
Was the information clear and easy to understand? No, said 57 percent.
Did government services continue to be provided during the pandemic? Not so, said 52 percent.
Did we trust information about COVID-19 from the government? Three out of four respondents did not.
Is the government responding quickly and effectively to each wave of the pandemic? Two out of three disagreed.
Finally, has the British Columbia government managed the pandemic well? Three out of four said it was not.
The assessments of indigenous respondents are even more negative; for example, 87 percent disagree that the government has handled the pandemic well.
Respondents were clearly angry with the government, but not for any single set of reasons. Some thought the government had crushed the economy; others believe that vulnerable populations such as the elderly and the immunocompromised have been left behind in the rush to reopen the economy.
That’s why the bad news is buried in the document, and why the document was released after two long months – and on a Friday afternoon.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t
I suspect the only lesson the current NDP government has learned is not to be in power when the next disaster strikes. New administrations are ignoring the plans of previous administrations, just as Trump ignored the pandemic plans left behind by the Obama administration.
Politicians around the world – even “zero COVID” Xi Jinping – now know they will be damned if they do something to prevent the next pandemic and damned if they do nothing. They also know that their population will be very reluctant to accept any preventative measures, even masking.
This may explain the generally weak response of governments to the current onslaught on health systems, particularly due to respiratory diseases in children. The resurgence of influenza, RSV and other viruses is largely the result of the loosening of public health “containment” that protected people from flu and colds in the early years of the pandemic.
In British Columbia, public health turned to accepting “personal responsibility” in the first week of April, when restrictions on gatherings, restaurants, travel, vaccination status and masking were eased. The old, the young and the immunocompromised were effectively set free. To protect hospitals and emergency rooms, we were told to “flatten the curve”—until we didn’t, and the system was truly overwhelmed.
Lessons we are comforted that our response to the pandemic was no worse than that of other provinces, and sometimes better.
That was a low bar, and this report offers some encouragement that our future responses will be better.
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