‘A living nightmare’: Alberta’s former CMOH says current COVID-19 situation was ‘preventable’

CALGARY (CityNews) ─ Two Alberta doctors are calling the province’s COVID-19 strategy “cold blooded,” and an experiment on the people of Alberta.

Dr. James Talbot, Alberta’s former chief medical officer of health, and Dr. Noel Gibney penned an open letter to the province, saying Albertans have a right to know what the next few months of modelling data looks like.

“You think you’ve fallen asleep, and you’re having this nightmare, and you try to wake up from it, and you can’t,” said Talbot. “It’s like a living nightmare.”

Alberta is dealing with a COVID-19 crisis that has seen well over 1,000 new cases a day for weeks while filling intensive care wards to almost twice normal capacity.

The province’s health delivery agency has had to scramble and reassign staff to handle the surge of intensive care patients far above the normal capacity of 173 beds.

Talbot describes what it’s like watching the COVID-19 situation unfold in Alberta as a medical professional.

“You know, I have friends, family, people I care about who are on the front lines,” he said. “I get a steady stream from them that people don’t seem to understand, and the government doesn’t seem to understand how unbearable this situation is for them.”

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In recent days, doctors have called for a swift lockdown or a “firebreak” to immediately reverse the tide of COVID-19 patients.

That would mean a mass shutdown of schools, non-essential businesses and mass gatherings.

Intensive care physicians, emergency ward doctors, the executive of the Alberta Medical Association and the Canadian Medical Association have issued such pleas in recent days.

Talbot says based on the decisions made by the Jason Kenney government, the strategy seems to be to let COVID-19 run its course.

“We think that they should come clean with that and let us know,” said Talbot. “Are they prepared to let this number of people die for two more weeks, two more months, for four more months?”

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Other researchers support the open letter, saying it’s important that the models are available for scientific scrutiny and to check for accuracy.

That’s something that didn’t happen before this summer.

“Alberta made mistakes,” said Gosia Gasperowicz, a developmental biologist at the University of Calgary. “The chief medical officer of health (Dr. Deena Hinshaw) and the government had absolutely wrong assumptions. Had they been put under scrutiny, the mistake could have been caught early in the summer. And other scientists could say, ‘hey, you’re assumptions are wrong, let’s not go this way.’”

Added Talbot: “Knowing that it’s all preventable, just makes it more horrible.”

In a statement to CityNews, Alberta Health said: “Recently, the Premier cited Alberta Health Service’s ‘early warning system’, an internal capacity-planning tool. This is not modelling data. It shows a wide range of potential scenarios at a given time, updated constantly based on the latest trends. The worst case informs contingency planning but, as the Premier said, government is working to ensure that does not happen.”

—With files from The Canadian Press