Proving Mr. Wilkinson Wrong, Again.

Remember this, from mid-April...

Apparently, the leader of the the B.C. Liberal Party, Andrew Wilkinson, has a problem with John Horgan leaving things to the competent professionals.

Here is the good Mr. Wilkinson asking a question on Mo Amir's local Lotuslandian podcast recently:

"Where's John Horgan?" 

Interestingly, as soon as he asks said question Mr. Wilkinson immediately answers it.

Himself...

"Well, about once a week they trot him out with something that seems to be almost marginal. And yet, every Premier and Governor in North America is on TV, radio, the Web every day talking about the status in their community and talking about what needs to get done."

****

Well, now, just one month later, the following is from a piece in Bloomberg by Natalie Obiko Pearson about B.C.'s COVID-19 success story so far and why it matters that both the decisions and the daily briefings were left to our most competent professional.

...B.C. stuck to old-fashioned basics, alerting primary care doctors by fax about how to be on the lookout for the novel pathogen and tracing potential transmissions through interviews. Data compiled on May 13 show the province’s Covid-19 death rate was 3 per 100,000 residents, better than almost anywhere in North America and much of Europe...

{snip}

...(Provincial health officer Bonnie) Henry has become the public face of the crisis. A former military doctor who helped track down Ebola infections in Uganda earlier in her career, she also personally handled the contact tracing of Patient Zero’s family in Toronto’s SARS outbreak.

“She’s really been trained for this,” says Perry Kendall, her predecessor. “She’s not scared of giving orders.”

British Columbia’s top politician, Premier John Horgan, has taken a back seat in the public eye; it’s Henry who presides over daily briefings.

That has been key, said Peter Berman, a public-health expert at the University of British Columbia. “The same scientist who was empowered to lead this effort also has the authority to issue instructions.”

Henry is the first to caution against complacency. “We don’t know what is going to happen with this virus,” she said at a recent briefing, where she underscored how the province could quickly lose all the gains it’d made by easing restrictions too far. “We need to hold the line.”


Enough said?


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