Contemplating winter with the COVID

Jeff Green | Oct 07, 2020

There was a point, during the heat of the summer, when new COVID-19 infections were as rare as snowflakes in July, and life under the ‘new normal’ was indeed pretty normal for many of us.

The opportunity to gather in backyards, parks and beaches and cottage docks and lawns, to hold BBQ’s and the odd potluck, and visit with friends and family, made the summer of ’20 a lot more pleasant than spring of ’20 was.

But even in the heat of the summer, we all knew that winter was coming. We wouldn’t know for a little while what kind of health risks the second wave of COVID-19 infections would bring for the general public, and for seniors in our communities, and we still don’t know.

We do know that the rate of infections is on the rise, and even though in our local area it has only hit in Kingston thus far, (there have been no confirmed COVID cases among Frontenac County permanent residents since June) it is only a matter of time until we have some cases in our small communities.

At this point in the pandemic, I think we can be comfortable in the knowledge that we have been sheltered from the worst by our rural way of life, our stable political system and the relatively robust capacity of our health system; primary care, paramedic services, and public health.

Unless things go haywire globally, we can rest easy that our communities will hold together. We can expect cases, and for those of us who are vulnerable, for predictable or unpredictable reasons, can count on a high level of care from their primary care team and/or hospitals that are fully prepared.

One of the reasons that the death rate from COVID-19 has dropped, is that hospitals around the world are committed to sharing information, and they have learned from treating people for the past 6 months.

That is all the good news about the second wave. The bad news is that we are headed into the indoor season, when it is much harder to meet with friends and relatives safely, the kids are back in school and that represents a risk to entire families. We are already pretty weary of the whole thing, and the end is not in sight. Add that to the normal winter reality of shorter days, longer nights, and cold weather, and it is not surprising that people are feeling pretty low right about now.

We are being told not to gather for Thanksgiving. Halloween plans are all about drive-by and virtual, and we know now that the Christmas craft sales, parades, parties, concerts, etc. that help us cope with the onset of winter are not going to happen in any normal way this year.

The businesses that were worst hit during the first wave, such as restaurants, will be hurting even more over the next few months

One of the frustrating things about this, is that there is no way out of it. There is a chorus of deniers out there, who either say the whole thing is a hoax or at least that the cure is worse than the disease, but is there a realistic alternative? If we ignore COVID and get back to the preCOVID-19 patterns, most of us would be fine but some of us would get sick, some would get very sick, and some would die.

The deniers argue that people are going broke, businesses are failing, and this leads into more stress, illness and even death, that COVID itself. The problems with that approach are numerous. For one thing, we have convincing evidence that the number of infections, illness and death from COVID-19 have been diminished by the measures we have collectively taken those who argue that the fact that our communities have been spared from COVID infections proves that the social distancing measures we have taken have been unnecessary, are using twisted logic. It’s like arguing that birth control is unnecessary because the rate of unwanted pregnancies drops when more people use birth control.

To argue as well that mandatory mask orders, distancing rules in enclosed spaces, even quarantine orders, are somehow an infringement on our rights as citizens, misunderstands the core values of our political system. It is legitimate for our elected officials to enact laws that curtail individual rights to serve our legitimate collective interest. A threat to the health and well-being of the most vulnerable in our society is such a legitimate public interest. There is certainly a disconnect between the messaging from the government about limiting social interactions such as family gatherings, while at the same time mandating up to 30 kids in a school classroom.

We are in a risk phase, the implications of another lockdown or even a semi-lockdown, on an already fragile economy, is such that we are going to be risking more infections in order to keep things moving along over the next 6 months.

The provincial government may not be getting it right, and should be taken to task, as they have been by the opposition parties and others. We should remember, however, that the real enemy is not the people who we disagree with or the officials who may not be hitting exactly the right balance between risk and social and economic hardship. The real enemy is an implacable virus that we do not yet have a solution for.

Whatever measures we can take to help each other, to ensure people are not sitting in a cold room all alone this winter, we need to take, individually and collectively. The summer was a bit of a respite for us all, and we were very fortunate that the influx of cottagers and Ontario based tourists did not result in many COVID-19 infections in cottage county, and none in Frontenac County. That is a tribute to the measures we all took and the cooperation from the seasonal and tourist populations alike.

We need to get back to helping each other now, just as we did during the spring lockdown.