It's been just over 4 years since the WHO declared COVID-19 to be a global heath emergency, but in many ways we seem to have forgotten that the pandemic ever happened. The only people who mention COVID-19 these days are anti-vax crazies and conspiracy theorists who rewrite the history of those years to be a story of unjustified government over-reaction and oppression.
But more than 1,000,000 people are confirmed to have died of COVID-19 in the United States. More than 50,000 Canadians died. More than 1900 died in Saskatchewan.
A healthy future is the story of the COVID-19 pandemic in Saskatchewan, as told by the leader of its official opposition, family doctor and health activist Ryan Meili. The book is an effort to un-erase the history of COVID-19 by following events from beginning to 'end', from month to month, through COVID wave after COVID wave. It serves as a much-needed reminder of those long months and years: I spent the first 4.5 months of the pandemic in Saskatchewan and even I was shocked at what I'd forgotten. Restrictions began with a 250 person gathering limit??? WTF? Oh yeah, that's right -- I remember now. The right-wing Saskatchewan Party's COVID response began with that weird under-reaction of a restriction on March 13, 2020, the day after the province's first confirmed case of COVID.
I left Saskatchewan near the end of July 2020, so I didn't follow events in that province as closely afterwards. But the overall story that Meili tells is familiar -- COVID waves, deaths, restrictions, vaccinations. Government responses that ranged from frustrating (why NOT tell us where in the province cases are happening? It's human nature to feel that something is 'somebody else's problem' without concrete data that tells you otherwise) to well-thought out (drive-in vaccination lineups made perfect sense in Saskatchewan) to heart-breakingly stupid (most of the rest of the Saskatchewan Party's policy decisions).
My one criticism of the book is also one of its strengths: A healthy future keeps the focus squarely on events and policy decisions in a single Canadian province. Readers from other places might not feel as engaged with the book when the specifics of their COVID experience will have been different. But at the same time, sometimes being specific is the best way of approaching the universal. By limiting himself to telling the story of his own province, Meili is not only rescuing Saskatchewan's COVID story from oblivion, he is rooting his observations and recommendations in a very particular set of facts.
I'll close with a quote that Meili includes in his concluding chapter "Lessons for the next wave":
"Among countries with available GDP data, we do not see any evidence of a trade-off between protecting people's health and protecting the economy. The relationship between the health and economic impact of the pandemic go in the opposite direction. As well as saving lives, countries controlling the outbreak effectively may have adopted the best economic strategy too" [1]
