Nor do I believe that the federal government ever possessed all the expertise needed to manage the crisis without calling upon the expertise acquired over many decades by caregivers in the field.
There would probably have been resistance to the exercise of this act, which would have caused delays and a situation that could have been avoided; hence my comments on the crisis.
There were some gaffes in the government's management, for example with the country's supplies, just as the Global Public Health Intelligence Network was not really effective. We saw the reports about that.
Nevertheless, we'll be able to criticize all of that in due course.
How then to explain the government's stance on not immediately wanting to provide funding to the health systems or to transfer the money needed to rapidly restore the decentralized management and coordination required by the health systems?
Cancer specialists and cardiologists have come here and told us that the redirection of patients would have repercussions, and that patients who do not have COVID-19 will suffer the consequences for 10 years and that the mortality rate will rise by 10%.
Not to mention the dramatically higher health costs! Let's say that a colonoscopy costs $1,000. Without an early diagnosis, a patient will begin to draw upon the health system and the cost of dealing with advanced cancer will be extremely high.
In view of all this, why was it decided to run everything unilaterally? On the one hand, the health transfers were deferred—that was the first mistake, from both the medical and economics standpoints—and on the other, standards and conditions were imposed. There are two sides to the way this pandemic was managed.