By Shachi Kurl, Executive Director
April 3, 2020 – Of late, I have found myself yearning for this time a year ago when my biggest problems included finding new things to say about the prime minister and the SNC-Lavalin scandal. Remember then? Such easy times (well, for most of us anyway).
Instead, we now spend our time and invest our emotional energies watching the grim, daily tally announced by politicians and public health officials of new diagnosed COVID-19 infections and the deaths this sickness has caused. As body counts rise, so too do our feelings of stress, anxiety and uncertainty. We worry for loved ones with whom we don’t live and can’t hug. We worry for ourselves and how so many of us will make it through financially. We are seized by the stretched-out, on-and-on-ness of it all.
Until now, our leaders have focused on the immediate must-dos that this novel coronavirus has dictated: banning public gatherings, closing schools, sending us home, imploring us to continue to stay home, creating economic rescue packages for those who do not have the privilege of working from home. But over time, this will transition – from reacting to crisis, to becoming routine.
And as our present situations become the new normal, the daily briefings cannot continue to simply be about updates to the numbers infected. People will become fatigued at the meaninglessness of this information over the next eight to 12 weeks (if indeed this is going to last eight to 12 weeks). The problem is, we don’t know, and most of us aren’t being given even an educated guess about timelines. While officials in British Columbia have released some early modelling to give us at least a vague picture of where we sit on the now infamous “curve,” it has been an outlier. Ontario followed suit Friday amid questions of why it hadn’t happened earlier. The prime minister’s comments on the matter have been a soliloquy of incoherence.
For the rest of this piece, please view it on the Ottawa Citizen’s site where it was initially published.
