It’s freezing cold in my apartment today. Warm tea and a blanket can only do so much. I can all but see my breath, shiver, and bundle up some more, blowing warm breath into cupped hands.
For almost a year, the days have been like this. Sometimes it’s freezing; in the summer months, sweat stains a crinkled forehead.
When it’s all over, I know I’ll miss certain parts of these cold and quiet mornings when the low winter sun stains a sky awash with bare oak branches, spanning, spinning, and stretching away from thick mossy trunks like spidery tentacles.
It’s been a year of noticing the small details to keep spirits up, of band-aids on gushing wounds, of fire extinguishers taken to a bushfire in a high wind, all in the name of keeping the provincial economy half afloat in a sad and devastating way. Keeping that economy going is one of two major concerns plaguing officials these days, the other one being keeping hospitals from overflowing.
New COVID-19 variants are popping up, and we can only hope, with crossed fingers and bated breath, that vaccines continue to work against those, once the vaccine rollout is finally completed. Provincial health officer Bonnie Henry has said that officials are unaware of where variant spread in the community began, which makes contact tracing impossible, necessary isolation improbable, and the odds of widespread variant infections higher.
When you’re at the end of your rope, the thought an incredibly strict lockdown might make you want to hurl. It sure does for me. But it may have as many positives and negatives as any other method; we’re all tired and pissed off at this invisible threat, so let’s give it a shot. The economy would suffer immensely in the short term and likely prosper more than it has in the last year in the long term.
Curfews imposed, sizes of gatherings restricted, stay-at-home orders put in place, and restaurants being ordered to close: here in BC, we’re technically not in lockdown, but we’ve had half those orders put in place, and maybe it’s time to put them all in place.
Cases are decreasing incredibly slowly at the expense of the mental (and maybe even physical) health of us, the people. We’re not in lockdown, but it feels like we are, and our freedoms are at least morally limited, if not legally.
Do it properly. Go all in. It might work, it might not, but with COVID-19, that seems to be the tagline.