The prospect of another term of isolation is… daunting, to say the least, and—to land somewhere between dramatic and realistic—downright depressing. It’s January, so it’s always dark and raining these days, so is there anything better to do than reheat the coffee, put on a warm sweater, and take a bunch of classes? Seems simple enough.
It’s not. At least not for me, and believe me when I say I’m not the most extroverted person, so that has to mean there are Camosun students absolutely crawling out of their skin.
I saw on the news the other day that, according to one source, the average secondary student has lost about six months of reading comprehension and a year of math since beginning to learn remotely just shy of a year ago. Think about that; let it sink in.
The tepid reality of the situation is that we are not meant to be isolated, and yet, here we are; if you’ve been thinking lately that you have something of a strange moral obligation to bend the rules for the sake of feeding your own soul, for your sanity, then you’re not alone, especially judging by the number of politicians who travelled this holiday season (including two of our very own here in Victoria).
However, on a societal level, it is completely unrealistic to ask an inherently social animal to completely isolate themselves for years at a time. Most of us have skimmed the results of those kind of psychological experiments, right? They never end well.
The question that remains is one that I think the provincial public health officer has to ask herself. Realistically, with many people getting their first jab at at a vaccine in fall ’21, just as flu season approaches yet again, how are people going to keep themselves safe and healthy until they get their vaccine? And sometimes safe isn’t healthy. Based off the amount of tears, anxiety, and sombre dispositions around my house of late, I can tell you that something has shifted. And I’m not sure what that something is.
About a year ago, we all started hearing about “the new coronavirus.” That’s really strange to think about; if nothing else, it shows how much can change in a year, and how much can be accomplished medically. Who knows where we’ll be in another year? Fall ’21 isn’t that long away in reality; but in a world with COVID-19 sometimes tomorrow is a lifetime away.