Aren’t you fed up yet with COVID-19?
I know I am. I’m fed up experiencing life under the pandemic, and even more fed up covering it. Every day it’s depressing COVID-19 in the news. If you feel depressed about the situation, know you’re not alone. We are all having to deal with it in some way.
What’s more, life is dull, with most of us spending our time at home. That has been my situation, working remotely from home for the last couple of weeks, and that will continue for the foreseeable future.
Basically I have been taking this pandemic situation seriously, and my hope is that you are doing the same. I’ve heard many stories of people continuing to be out and about, and saying, “Well, this isn’t like New York or Italy or China, there aren’t so many cases here so we don’t need to stay at home.”
That’s a good way for an outbreak to erupt here. Please, folks, stay at home.
Things have happened so fast and I thought I would provide a bit of a timeline of events to give you an idea of how quickly our lives have changed:
It was March 6, Western Development Museum. That was the venue of the Battlefords Chamber’s Power Hour featuring appearances from six of our local and regional elected officials.
The audience had their opportunity to pose written questions to the elected officials on the important issues facing the Battlefords. I was curious whether they would ask about one issue in particular: the Coronavirus threat.
Heck, we’d been running stories online about it for weeks. The virus was wreaking havoc on China, South Korea, Iran and Italy, and worries about its impact had tanked the stock markets for two straight weeks.
Yet no one asked any questions about it! Instead, the politicians were posed questions on the hot issues of what super powers they would like to have(!), about how levels of governments could better work together, and what they thought of the WEXIT Party trying to get officially registered.
Complacency seemed the order of the day. I came away thinking, “Wow, are we not ready for this.”
There was a noticeable shift in attitude by Monday, March 9.
That was the date of the announcement by the city and town of a joint administrative response to the pandemic. Preparations were under way. In retrospect, you have to think the folks in charge knew what was coming.
I did quite a big writeup on it, but was surprised to find the story buried in the paper when the March 12 issue came out.
In fact, when you look at that particular issue, you still got the sense COVID-19 was a world away. The top stories were the water woes (again) at Saskatchewan Hospital and another murder in the city. On the sports pages we were reporting on the winning North Stars and previewing all the hockey games happening on the weekend.
It was the calm before the storm. The gravity of the situation exploded Wednesday night, March 11, after our paper had gone to press.
Events were transpiring in Oklahoma City that would shake the sports world. Utah Jazz basketball player Rudy Gobert was in the process of testing positive for COVID-19, and the game with the Thunder was being called off. The NBA then immediately suspended its season.
The gravity of that moment was not lost on me. To calm myself down, I immediately went to the supermarket to stock up on food.
That made me feel a little better, but I felt nowhere near ready for this pandemic, and for all the life changes that went with it.
The next day, March 12, it felt like the world was collapsing. Saskatchewan announced its first presumptive case of COVID-19, the Junos were called off, the Saskatchewan Rush season was suspended, and every sports league in business was announcing it was postponing or cancelling its season.
The North Stars’ season was ultimately cancelled, but for a while that day it looked like the SJHL might try to carry on. We actually had a big discussion in the newsroom about whether I should even cover Game Five of the North Stars-Hawks series on Friday at the Civic Centre. My fear was that somebody there might test positive for COVID-19, and then I’d then have to go self-isolate for 14 days just by being in the arena. We were getting paranoid.
I had set aside that same Thursday evening to go to Saskatoon to get a haircut and do some shopping, and try to get my mind off of things. It’s a good thing I did, too, because it was among the last opportunities anyone in the province would have to get their hair cut.
I treated it like my final night of freedom. One of my stops that night was Walmart. The place was like the Gulf Coast during hurricane season: there were lines of people in the checkouts, stocking up as if the end of the world was upon us. Of course, they cleared the aisles of all the toilet paper, just like everywhere else.
Had I realized what was transpiring elsewhere, I might have gone on even more of a spending spree. That same time, a number of Saskatchewan doctors were gathered in Edmonton for a curling bonspiel running through March 14. That event would turn into the most infamous bonspiel in Canadian history, because 11 of those Saskatchewan participants came home infected with COVID-19.
That weekend, a snowmobile rally proceeded up at Christopher Lake. It became the most infamous snowmobile rally in the history of Saskatchewan. At least 20 cases of COVID-19 were reported from people who attended the banquet.
That gives you an idea how fast this virus can spread. It was on our doorsteps, yet we thought we had more time.
It’s a cautionary tale about how all of us need to take this virus seriously.
Now we are heading into April. We should be celebrating the arrival of spring, yet we don’t even get a moment to enjoy it. Instead, it has been one announcement after another of restrictions, postponements, closures, you name it, in the Battlefords and elsewhere. Life is in a perpetual holding pattern.
One of these days, this pandemic will end. It has to, because from my standpoint this is no way to live.
The only excitement in my own life is when I make a trip to the grocery store. My days and nights are a blur. Instead of live sports, my weekends are spent sitting at home watching dull TV reruns. Then, when Monday rolls around and I get up from bed to go to work, my morning commute is very short — right to the living room, where I plunk myself down at the computer for another full day of coverage of COVID-19. We are basically all pandemic, all the time.
This COVID-19 crisis cannot end soon enough. That’s easy for me to say.
