This is the hard part

Jeff Green | May 27, 2020

I don't know about the rest of you, but it seems to me that we are just now hitting the most difficult stretch of time that we will likely face in this year of the COVID.

It's been over two months since the shutdown. We sheltered in place, watched Netflix, learned to love, and then hate, Zoom.

We looked at pictures of bread and desserts on Facebook and Instagram, suffered through a spring the never came, and saved some lives and the integrity of our healthcare system while accumulating debt, on both a household and national scale.

And we worked together as communities in any way we could. We did it.

Now what?

Some of those early, dire long-term statements by Public Health Officials are coming back to haunt us. You know, the ones that we put out of our minds in March because they were not important in the face of the immediate goal of flattening the initial curve marking the spread of the virus and a corresponding curve marking the grim death count.

The ones that said, 'this will be with us for a year or more, until a vaccine is created, tested, tested, and tested again, and then manufactured and administered widely enough to protect our herd.

Dr. Moore, from KFL&A Public Health, said that the more success we have in flattening the curve the longer we will have to practice self-distancing.

That sounded alarming at the time, but not quite real. Now it is real.

Way back in March, it occurred to me that many of us were sheltering out of fear. Rightly or wrongly we thought that if we got too close to people it could kill us.

If they had it and we got it, we could either not get sick, get a bit sick, get really sick, or die. In reality, the drive to town that preceded any exposure to other people was always more dangerous than our chances of contracting the virus was.

But we needed to protect everyone because, unlike a car accident, coronavirus is catching. We were home to protect everyone.

The flip side, where we are now, is that we are being told we can start going out more. With careful monitoring and testing, which are not in place, inevitable outbreaks of the virus that result from this exposure can be traced and managed without stressing the healthcare system beyond its limits.

For us as individuals, however, the risk that comes from living a normal life is the same in June as it was in March, and it appears it will be the same in October and November as well. Nothing has fundamentally changed.

But instead of being told to shelter at home, we are now being told to start getting out, carefully, and unless it is extended, by the end of July we will see the mainstay of government support, the CERB, run out.

While most everyone followed the stay at home order, that social cohesion is breaking down. Some people, realizing that nothing has changed, are still in hiding, venturing out once a week for groceries in fear.

On the other extreme are the Trinity Bellwood types, the Trumps, the beach and pool party goers. They have decided to live their lives as they wish, take on the minimal risk to themselves and ignore the fact that they pose a risk to the rest of us if they become carriers and pass the virus on.

The vast majority of us are somewhere in between those two extremes, but all of us are now making these calculations every day. We weigh out the risk of exposure against the risk posed by continued isolation to our social and economic worlds.

Out patience for this disruption to our normal pattern of life is waning, and many of us simply can't afford it anymore.

Welcome to the summer of COVID.