The Biggest Problem With COVID-19? The Patients Who Don’t Die.

Alberta is the latest jurisdiction to be crushed by a tsunami of COVID patients — but it didn’t have to be this way.

Newly married in 1951 and pregnant with anticipation, my folks joined the great post-war exodus from Europe to North America, emigrating by ocean-liner from Holland to Canada in search of opportunity.

Their straight-laced version of Protestant religion crossed the Atlantic with them. Soon they had a brood of children (by 1968 they’d generated an iteration of Cheaper By The Dozen), dutifully shepherding them to church twice each Sunday to be properly schooled in the tenets of the faith.

The church’s Reverend, himself a Dutch immigrant and as fond of cigars as he was of sermonizing, had but a nodding acquaintance with the English language. To get himself through sermons in his adopted tongue he drew heavily on a store of pet phrases committed to memory; there were, to put it mildly, a few slip-ups.

His favoured descriptor for the elderly and sick was “the weak and the feeble”. Hands laced together on the pulpit, he led the congregation one Sunday morning in thickly accented prayer: “Shine your mercies, O Lord, on the feak and the weeble among us.” I’m sure the good Lord knew what he meant, but my brothers and I doubled over in our pew, stifling…