One of the key lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic is that for at least the past decade, we focused disproportionately, or rather our governments did, on one potential global threat — human-induced climate change — to the exclusion of all others.
Anthropogenic climate change became the issue that sucked up all the oxygen in the room when it came to a global crisis.
At the expense of, for example, a contagious and deadly virus becoming a pandemic, which public health experts have been warning us about for decades.
In Canada, our political leaders, have long ignored — perhaps the fairer word is “downplayed” — the health care threat posed by the fact our hospitals are chronically overcrowded, with thousands of patients being treated in hallways, year after year.
That’s why the greatest concern health-care experts have now is that our hospitals, overcrowded in normal times and routinely operating at or beyond their designated capacities — as opposed to 80% of capacity to be able to handle a “black swan” event like COVID-19 — may soon be overrun by critically-ill patients.
For the rest of this column: https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/goldstein-we-gambled-on-the-wrong-threat-climate-change