TORONTO – Crossfire on the government led by Doug Ford. The hot fronts continue to be the school front, the increasingly alarming emergency due to the lack of beds in intensive care and the missteps recorded in the vaccination campaign in Ontario. The executive has shown all its limitations due to the lack of fundamental coherence in its strategy to combat Covid-19 in this third wave of the pandemic. The school is a case in point.

Last week the position of Premier Ford and Public Education Minister Stephen Lecce had been quite clear: schools are safe – the phrase repeated at every press conference – contagion among students remains extremely low and coronavirus containment and tracking plans implemented in school facilities have proven effective and reliable. But in the face of the executive’s position, more and more alarming data were presented: hundreds of students infected every day – with a peak of more than 500 infections in 24 hours – dozens of schools closed due to the presence of outbreaks and school boards in crisis.

 So much so that just last week, in the run-up to the spring break, the health authorities in Toronto and Peel imposed the closure of all schools until 19 April, occasionally bypassing and bypassing the government. In recent days Ford and Lecce have defended the executive’s position, reiterating how schools in the province would welcome students back to class after the holidays.

The Minister of Education himself sent a letter to the parents of the students, offering guarantees on the continuity of lessons in the classroom. Then yesterday, within hours, the government backtracked: schools closed across Ontario and distance learning sine die. In short, the whole and the opposite of everything in a matter of hours.

The result is a sense of great uncertainty for all families with dependent children, who do not currently know whether schools will reopen in a week’s time, in a month or directly in September, in conjunction with the start of the new school year.

But also in the crosshairs is the Minister of Health, Christine Elliott, who on Monday and yesterday underlined how the province is engaged in a race against time to set up new beds in intensive care in Ontario hospitals, given the boom in hospitalizations of Covid patients infected with the new English variant. How is it possible that the government has only now noticed the emergency, when in the last three weeks the association representing hospital workers, the one that protects nurses and numerous virologists and experts have repeatedly stressed the need to increase capacity in intensive care and, at the same time, to activate restrictions to curb contagion in communities? We are talking about the same government which just two weeks ago planned to loosen several containment measures, such as the reopening – scheduled for 12 April – of hairdressers and barbers in Toronto.

And what about vaccination? Until a few weeks ago, the justification for the hiccup trend of the immunization campaign was that of the lack of vaccines. Every day in Ontario we have a lot of doses that we cannot dispose of. According to yesterday’s covid19tracker.ca data, Ontario has so far received 4,031,325 doses from the federal government, administering 3,310,157 at a rate of about 95,000 a day. At this time, about 700 thousand doses of vaccine lie unused in the refrigerators of hospitals and mass immunization clinics.