A Message from your Base Surgeon

Hey All, it’s your Base Surgeon.

This is a quick piece in praise of overreaction. You might have noticed that we’re doing OK here—we’ve avoided painful outbreaks in local nursing homes, our case count has been low, our hospitals haven’t been overrun, and we’ve even pushed out medical troops to support hard-pressed longterm care homes. There’s talk of reopening the economy, reopening travel, resuming training. You might be left wondering, “if we’re doing so well, wasn’t all of this a bit much? Wasn’t this an overreaction?”

That’s the paradox of a good pandemic response.

If you do it right, you’ll be left wondering if it was all necessary in the first place. It plays on a flaw in human psychology—it’s very easy for us to appreciate effects when we do something. It’s almost impossible to see the effects of not doing something. If you cough on someone and they get sick, that’s easy to understand. If you decide to stay home, and would have infected two people if you had gone out, that can only be imagined, not seen. Doing something leads to a concrete story. Not doing something leads to a change in statistical rates, seen only by squinting at the rearview mirror. We’re natural story-telling animals, not intuitive statisticians. No wonder it’s hard.

The truth is that someone’s grandparent is alive right now because one of you reading this washed your hands. Or didn’t go to work. Or wore a mask. Because they didn’t get sick we’ll never be able to tell a compelling story. But the fact that Petawawa has met this challenge and prevented it from becoming a crisis is because of your efforts—the things done and not done. So thanks to everyone for overreacting—it’s what’s keeping us safe.

Tim JL Peppin, MD, Base Surgeon, Garrison Petawawa