It Begins (Covid-19 News Issue 4)

It Begins

I reported here two days ago that we had 31 COVID19 cases in the London area.  We now have 66 and 3 fatalities.  This number is going to climb in the days ahead.  One of the new cases is at Fanshawe College, a student in residence.  A residence is where you expect to find COVID19 and where you don’t want to.  Nursing homes, hospitals, prisons, student residences, apartment buildings, refugee camps, cruise ships, anywhere where people are crammed together in large numbers is where this virus will multiply and spread.

One of the few places where people are still congregating is grocery stores.  Some people order their groceries online and schedule pick-up, others pay a hefty fee for home delivery, but most folks go to the physical stores.  I’ve been in grocery stores that are still relatively crowded where people are standing too close together too long in slow moving lines.  Some people are masked but not many.  I admit I wish the military were involved in distributing essentials.  Alert soldiers in PPE assuring the numbers shopping in the store were appropriate, monitoring the spacing regulations, enforcing buying limits.  Allowing people to crowd and mill about as we still do in grocery stores seems surpassingly stupid.  COVID19 is in the community.  If it is in the community, it’s in the grocery stores.  We’re still not responding to this as we should.  If we avoid a serious crisis in our region, we’ll owe it to the doctors and nurses who are bracing for an onslaught.  We have to wake up and begin regulating our daily lives as if we were in the midst of a plague, which we are, an unknown virus sweeping the world.

I go for walks but they are not much of a respite.  There are still too many people wandering about as if nothing is happening.  The city had to close the dog parks because folks couldn’t figure out themselves that it wasn’t a good idea to stand around shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers admiring the antics of Rex and Frisky.  Yes, 80 percent of those who contract this virus will not need hospitalization, although they may get plenty sick.  Yes, the 20 percent who do need hospitalization will mostly be elderly and infirm.  Yes, of that 20 percent, maybe only a small percent will die, so lots and lots of people are not going to get sick or very sick, and fewer still are going to die, but there are some ugly anomalies out there, cases where young people have died after what looks like a cytokine storm, which is basically an immune-system meltdown, a private biological Chernobyl.  This vicious little virus is nothing to sneer at.  We know almost nothing about it except that it’s trying to colonize us and is prepared to kill us to do it.

So, if you can stay home, stay home.  Take your dog in the yard, if you have one (yard or dog).  Send the kids to the basement and pour a tall one.  Wait it out.

The thought sometimes occurs to me that we may be living through one of the most far-reaching events in human history.  Maybe not, but maybe so.  Maybe we’re never going back to normal, and maybe we shouldn’t.  So far, it looks to me like some of us think it’s not much worse than an especially bad snowstorm, a bit of a nuisance but kind of fun, too.  Anyway, nothing we can’t get by in a week or two.  I hope they’re right, but I don’t believe it at all.

COVID-19 NEWS.  secretary@opseu110.ca

Thursday, April 2, 2020