Jenn

Quote

The following morning, the Yemenite mother called me.

Her child, who recently developed a measles rash, was coughing so violently she was vomiting.

I told her to go to the hospital.

Later, she called me again, upset.

She said that when she got to the ER, they'd told her to go home.

I couldn't help but think something was off.

The hospital doesn't turn people away, I told her, but she insisted that they had.

So I called them directly to figure out what had happened.

It turned out there had been a miscommunication.

Hospital staff had told her not to come in, using a stop fan gesture to communicate, and she had become so flustered that she failed to catch the second part of the message, that she should wait in the car while they prepared a negative pressure room.

End quote.

If your measles outbreak comes from this sort of community, the solution isn't to fearmonger about anti-vaxxers.

It is to train up and hire healthcare workers who can speak low German.

And to be clear, I think the foos that are affected are doing this, or at least the Ontario ones are, because our public health bodies are generally not disconnected from reality.

And that's what I found most frustrating about the media coverage.

It obscures something that's genuinely very hopeful and turns it into another random culture warshitfest.

But actually, it turns out that when you remove the actual language and access barriers, people make reasonable healthcare decisions for their families at pretty high rates.

So yes, Canada lost its measles elimination status today.

But we can get it back in a year and a bit if we're serious.