The next little while, until election day comes and goes and all the votes are counted, is as politically charged as it gets, municipally, provincially, nationally, and—considering we’re so close to the US election as well—internationally.
And make no mistake about it: the COVID-19 crisis is at the forefront of everything.
Some days, reading the news makes breathing feel one step short of taking a swig of old beer that has been sitting in the sun for two hours and is full of spit-logged cigarettes.
The pandemic is out of my control. It’s out of your control. And, yes, it’s even out of Trudeau’s control. It might be clear to each individual what not to do, but I haven’t heard anyone provide an actual sound solution that covers all the bases medically, economically, and socially. It’s like trying to catch fog in a pallor palm on a misty fall morning.
Trudeau either covers us now and we pay for it later, or he cuts the country off and millions go hungry. That’s not meant as hyperbole, or a red herring argument: acording to Canadian charity Breakfast Club of Canada, about 2,000,000 children go to the germ-laden petri dish that is school without eating breakfast; that number was about 1,000,000 before the start of the COVID-19 crisis. There is no right thing, not from the left, the centre, or the right. There are only people treading water, panting for a break.
Part of the job of a journalist is to always be somewhat down the middle; to hear out all sides of the argument. Now, I’m no anti-masker, but I listen to them speak, which is their right. I can agree with them, or I can call them out, which I usually do, because COVID-19 is more serious than any virus we’ve seen in recent history. The trouble is that the economic and social shutdowns in BC and Canada were, more or less, pre-emptive in the sense that the virus was only about three months old back in March. To date, there have been over 35.5 million COVID-19 infections around the world, and 1.05 million deaths. This means that 2.93 percent of people who have been documented with COVID-19 have died from it.
It’s impossible to bring these statistics to light without sounding like an over-simplistic, pro-global-economy sociopath. One who is on the apathetic side of logical, at that. I’m none of those things. I think that going to phase three so soon was a stupid decision on the part of the provincial government. I understand why they did it, but that doesn’t make it not stupid. Not making masks mandatory in public—the way seatbelts are in your own car—was stupid.
But all statistics deserve the same amount of airtime. Without the shutdowns, the global deaths could very well be closer to 10 million, and taking into account undiagnosed and unreported cases, they might be.
This is here to stay; into the winter, into 2021 and 2022. It will be interesting to see what happens, and to see how this will change healthcare in the future.
In other words, things are only going to get even more politically charged over the next couple years.