Fifty-seven
days into lock-down, articles begin to emerge that speak of endings. How might
this pandemic end? They claim the ending is two-fold, two-sided: the end of the
disease itself, or the social ending, when those on voluntary lock-down grow
tired, move to re-emerge, and simply live with the consequences. There are
elements opening up into the latter as we speak, from parts across the United
States, to Canadian provinces British Columbia and Quebec. A friend out west is
called back as university bookstore staff, and schools are set to open throughout
la belle province. What changed? A week earlier, Quebec was holding tighter
than most, but now are willing to release their strict measures for the sake of
reopening the economy. How much is a human life worth? How much is a population
worth? A week ago, as Andrew Nikiforuk wrote for TheTyee in his article “We
Are in a New Danger Zone” of lockdown exhaustion, fears of an economic depression
and general fear for the future:
We want this emergency to
end. And many want it to end at any cost.
And that is where the
dangers lie. For we now live in the domain of a novel coronavirus.
Writing
in early May for the CBC website on the unending lockdown and cold-weather
records in Windsor, Casey Plett writes: “In a long winter, my body can enter an
amnesiac stasis. I forget the world can be another way.” Articles speak of “murder
hornets” entering the United States, a trickle that, unless stopped, could so
easily become a wave.
Two
further articles float by my Twitter-feed, that “Demand for P.E.I. school food
program is 4-times higher than when pandemic started,” and that “This Energy
Analyst Says the Oil Sands Are ‘Done’,” “COVID-19 is making many bearish about
bitumen. Deborah Lawrence’s past pessimism has proven unpopular, and correct.”
We
are living through so much of a space that is both the endless present and the
impossible future. Will this be our new normal, with lock-downs, wearing face-masks
while shopping or at work, or might this be something we barely recall in five,
or even two years? Does anyone remember SARS, or H1N1? Will there be long-term
effects of this global pandemic in how we interact with each other, or in the
multiple social and income disparities being spotlit during this crisis? The Spanish
Flu altered the ways our public spaces were built, and changes we aren’t even
aware of anymore. On April 30, on the World Economic Forum website, Kate
Whiting’s interview with science journalist Laura Spinney speaks of the
difference of those with TB struck first by the pandemic, the increase in
illiteracy compared to today, causing rumours and misinformation to run wild,, and
the resulting baby boom of the 1920s from a population of young and healthy survivors.
Also, as Spinney offers:
It gave a big boost to
the concept of socialized medicine and healthcare, which no country had really
got around to organizing yet. The pandemic is what gave the stimulus to do that
because there was a realization that a pandemic was a global health crisis you
had to treat at the population level. You couldn't treat individuals and there
was no point in blaming individuals for catching an illness or treating them in
isolation.
What
will Covid-19 bring? Could all of those meetings really have been emails?
As
Nova Scotia theatre director and playwright Ken Schwartz writes as part of his “Pandemic
Diary” entry on the CBC website:
Today, I feel like a
cobbler in a world of people who no longer wear shoes.
Once
we wrestle the girls from their morning tablets, Rose and Aoife work to dismantle
the living room and set up a substantial fort of all the blankets and pillows
from their beds. By mid-morning, they insist I experience their structure from
within. The inside of their fort is very dark. Even my voice seems muffled. Cool
and quiet, it is all I can do to remain awake. Later on, a package of ordered
materials arrives with the doorbell, and as I open to see what it is, Aoife
breaks down in tears, deeply upset that it wasn’t her Oma. She misses her Oma,
and wants to see her. I don’t know what to tell her.
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