Every week, I write the student editor’s letter—Monday morning means it’s time for me to address Camosun students, to have the story edited by Tuesday and running live on the site first thing Wednesday morning. Sometimes the topics come easy: the low-hanging fruit for this week is the fact that two people in Greater Victoria were fined a pretty hefty amount over the weekend for breaking COVID-19 restrictions.
Personally, on a psychological level, I’m surprised that COVID-19 is still being talked about as much as it is. We’ve been living with it for almost 10 months, and yet it seems as though people are still chitter-chattering about it at every turn. I think it’s because most of us here on the island haven’t been anything more than inconvenienced by the virus. I have friends in Utah, Virginia, and the UK, where COVID-19 is an entirely different story. In Utah, the state has officially started rationing health care. The UK has all but completely shut down its economy.
But what’s fascinating to me is that my friends in those places all still seem really eager to talk about it. Is it a coping mechanism? I’m not sure. For some reason, when I hear stories about, say, the Second World War (which this is constantly being compared to) people—at least in the stories my grandmother has told me—were talking about anything except the conflict at hand.
It makes me wonder how healthy this societal obsession with the pandemic is, fed incessantly by push notifications, comments, likes, snaps, stories, and your own nagging voice that wants nothing more than a moment of quiet.
I can hear you conspiracy theorists out there screaming, “This is how the government wants you to feel!”
It’s probably not.
But maybe we shouldn’t all be obsessing over daily numbers. Maybe the increase or decrease in active cases should take the headline, not the amount of new cases. It seems to me that focusing on active cases would paint a more accurate, complete, and, to channel provincial health officer Bonnie Henry, calm picture. Unfortunately, editors tend to be very keen on outrage stories.
But when we look at places like Australia, where they have had a strict lockdown followed by a dramatic drop in cases (zero were recorded between 8 pm this past Friday and 8 pm Saturday, the first time that’s happened since June 9) it’s hard not to argue that maybe we should all hunker down—way stricter than we ever have before—and wait for the virus to die. It would obliterate the economy, sure… but isn’t it already in shambles? It only took Victoria, Australia 112 days to get to a day without new cases. It’s possible.
One of the toughest parts about all of this is that I’m finding it hard to have opinions that aren’t indecisive and conflicting. And, to be really frank, that scares me more than any other aspect of COVID-19.