Today marks the one-hundredth day since my family went into voluntary self-isolation in response to the global coronavirus pandemic. During January and February I’d been following the outbreaks in China and especially Italy very closely (I’m something of a news junkie) and we had been mildly concerned… but when Italy began a lockdown of its northern provinces in early March, we realized that it would be a good possibility that we’d face a similar problem.
The threat of a viral pandemic, especially one that appeared to be spread by contagious people who were non-symptomatic for the first stage of the infection, is one that my immediate family had to take seriously: One member of our household has a compromised immune system. In early March we consciously began to start stocking up on essentials.
Nothing crazy or panicked of course – it was just simple things. Instead of buying a twelve-pack of toilet paper, we bought a twenty-four, as an example; we’d add a couple of extra jars of pasta sauce and some bread yeast to the grocery cart. Prescriptions were filled, the car was kept gassed up and so forth. I made jokes online that I’d finally cleaned out our big chest freezer, and it had only taken the threat of global pandemic to do it (this was back when we still made pandemic jokes.)
I even made sure my home bar was stocked up and laid in an extra bottle of my favourite whiskey. It wasn’t hurried or even urgent, just a matter-of-fact approach to being prepared for something we hoped wouldn’t happen; not too much different from the kind of pre-hurricane-season stocking up my spouse recognized from living in the Caribbean and certainly not the kind of rush-out-and-get-groceries thing that we’d have done had there been a warning of an impending ice storm or blizzard.
This was around the first week of March. On the sixth of March I picked up one of my siblings and their partner at Pearson International Airport in Toronto, and I was amazed to see that people were wearing surgical masks on the street. When we had a bathroom break at a rest stop just off the highway, I was mildly astonished to see a lineup for the sinks in the men’s room while people calmly followed the official advice to soap their hands for twenty seconds; it seemed that people were taking the official warnings seriously after all. We stopped for dinner at a crowded restaurant, visited with relatives, and had an extensive conversation about the lockdowns in Europe, since they’d just come from the UK.
That was my last normal day.
Early the next week my spouse was informed by their professional association that all non-essential health practitioners in Ontario would have to suspend their services temporarily as a safety precaution. Chiropractors, massage therapists, optometrists, audiologists, and so forth… and all of a sudden a pandemic stopped being theoretical for us. It was going to happen.
On Thursday March 12th the Ontario government announced that the March Break would be extended by two weeks and all publicly-funded schools would remain closed during that time as a precautionary measure. Major league basketball had suspended their season the day before, and major league baseball announced a temporary shutdown. The financial markets plunged. And the Prime Minister and his wife were reported as being in self-isolation after a potential exposure to COVID-19.
And that’s when the panic started. Grocery stores were suddenly full of people grabbing whatever they could. Toilet paper, famously, began disappearing off the shelves at a record rate. Hand sanitizer simply could not be found at any price. Pasta, tinned foods and frozen foods began to disappear (Oddly, bar soap was not subject to panic-buying, even though it had already been proven that simple, ordinary soap was extremely effective at destroying coronavirus.) Stories of hoarding, of reselling and of profiteering began filling social media.
We watched the first days of the pandemic in consternation but with a certain degree of complacency – our freezer was full, our pantry well-stocked, we had a modest amount of money in the bank. We were, in fact, in a pretty good position to weather a couple of weeks of disruption. We ran out of sliced bread and I made a fresh, home-baked loaf… and then had to make another because we ate the first one before it had a chance to get cold. My extended family set up a Facebook chat and we all touched base every single day to make sure everyone was doing well. I began to sit up late with a glass of whiskey while the TV played one of the many realtime-counter streams from YouTube.
It was all still a novelty.
As the weeks started to wear by, closures were extended. The news began reporting on critical shortages of personal protective equipment in hospitals. We joined the local “caremongering” group for a time, and then were pressured out when it was hijacked by people with an overtly religious agenda. I jumped on the sourdough-starter bandwagon. My spouse got involved in a sewing group which made PPE for care facilities, and once a week we’d take a thirty-minute drive to drop off an armload of caps and masks, which had the benefit of making sure the car got run on a regular basis. Our groceries ran low, so rather than risk going to a store (social distancing or not) we signed up for delivery and were given the first available time-slot… which was two weeks later.
The novelty had definitely worn off by that point.
We got creative with what food remained in the house. I found a local farm store that was still open, doing curbside pickups and enforcing social-distancing with an absolutely draconian fervour, which allowed us to get eggs, fruit and maple syrup. After a stop there I cheated and, with mask and sanitizer on hand, ran into the LCBO to buy booze, thereby triggering a serious martial dispute that made things absolutely miserable for days… and just as we sorted that out, I developed a dental infection that required a root canal, which meant we had to find a dentist that was open during what had now become a full-fledged lockdown and was carefully observing pandemic precautions. I went through a two-week series of dental surgeries which meant that the only solid food I could eat was the goddamn gut-rotting antibiotics. My sourdough starter crashed and began to smell like bilgewater. Sick of hair in my eyes, I broke down and dug out my old clippers and shaved my head.
And through it all, the death toll has continued to rise. As of last night, June 16th, there were 99,467 confirmed cases of COVID-19 infection in Canada. 8213 Canadians have died, with a disproportionately high percentage of those being senior citizens in private long-term-care facilities. (Numbers from Google.) I can’t remember anything in my lifetime killing more than eight thousand Canadians in four months; I suspect the last time that happened was the Second World War.
It’s easy to lose sight of that, especially as the media focus has shifted away from the deaths. It’s just become… normal.
…
Individual details aside, I’m sure our experience of coronavirus lockdown is pretty typical for suburban white Canadians.
A hundred days of lockdown has been an incredibly different experience for many of our friends. I’m not going to deny that my immediate family is a position of extraordinary privilege here: We have a good-sized house with a fenced yard big enough for a kitchen garden, we have the wherewithal to order groceries in every couple of weeks and we have the extra budget to pay someone to deliver (thankfully, the wait times for delivery have dropped to reasonable as local grocery stores have been able to gear up to meet demand).
We also have a support network of friends and family in the area who are able to help each other out with the little things, and we’ve got the skills and resources to give back to the community: Most of the masks and caps my spouse has made, for example, were made of cloth from the “fabric stash” in the basement… and only in recent weeks has that stash been depleted enough that we’ve had to take advantage of the gradual reopening of our local Fabricland. One of our neighbours is an emergency department nurse who’s working insane hours, so I’ve been cutting their lawn as well as our own because I have the time to it.
These are small things, but we’ve got the privilege to give back more than we take so that’s what we’re trying to do. Our privilege is so great, in fact, that our primary concern other than finding a dentist (and we had the privilege of being able to afford one when we did) has been trying to find meaningful things to do in order to keep from going stir-crazy.
We’ve got friends who live in high-rise apartments without balconies or opening windows… and friends who live in basement apartments with the same problem. We know people whose housing situations are precarious… and some who are only currently housed because of the Ford government’s frankly surprising moratorium on evictions. Some of our friends are frontline healthcare workers. Some have been declared “essential” and have had to continue to work in conditions of variable safety. Many have found themselves suddenly having to educate and entertain their children in those conditions… and I know at least one friend who’s struggling with not being able to see their kids in person because they’re working in an actually essential high-risk medical field and have had to live in isolation.
And I know a few people who’ve been infected by COVID-19.
Thankfully, we haven’t had any deaths from COVID-19 in our social circle, although I have a few friends who’ve lost elderly relatives. This disease is a real and serious threat, and will remain so until a vaccine is developed… which is why it’s intensely frustrating to see local people not taking this shit seriously.
I don’t know what it’s like in the big cities, but while we’re being careful – nigh obsessive – about our self-isolation, I can literally look outside my front window and watch people walking down the sidewalk without an apparent care in the world. Any trip outside the house reveals that very few people are wearing masks or observing social distancing. I keep trying to tell myself it’s a case of false feedback – the people who are taking the threat seriously aren’t going out that much so I’m only seeing the idiots, but it really does shock me sometimes. Most of the province of Ontario is going to “Phase 2” of reopening this Friday and the infection curve is still rising, albeit somewhat slower than feared… but I worry we’re going to see a massive spike when malls and patios reopen.
In fact, the one of the few groups I see taking this seriously are the Black Lives Matter protesters who’ve begun to demonstrate since the murder of George Floyd a little more than three weeks ago.
I’m planning on writing a post on the Black Lives Matter movement and the broad response to George Floyd’s death, the systemic racism and oppression which contributed to it, and my take on what it means for our world. But that’s going to be a very long post on it’s own, and this one has turned out long and somewhat rambling, so I’ll wind things down for today with one last observation: People have been isolating for months, taking the pandemic extremely seriously, and now they’re taking to the streets in astonishing, record-breaking numbers in response to racism and police brutality.
Against that, any discomfort or inconvenience that I’ve experienced in my privileged white suburban situation simply isn’t worth considering. I’ll condemn the idiots swarming the beaches or demonstrating because they can’t get a haircut, but I have nothing but admiration for those who are taking to the streets to protest injustice. And while we have not been able to physically join them for the same reasons that our family had to self-isolate (and will continue to self-isolate) I am steadfast in my support for the Black Lives Matter movement: The protesters understand and accept the risks and they’re doing it anyway.
Because that’s how important this moment in history is: In the midst of a global pandemic people around the world are standing up in the face of police repression and violence and are doing it with their eyes wide open to the potential consequences to their own health and safety.
