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No one knows when the COVID-19 pandemic will end
IfIf you’ve been marking the pandemic by the pileup of cautious reopenings and rescheduled events, you might think that an end to this global disaster is in sight. Event planners for the Kentucky Derby and Bonnaroo already have new opening days on the books in September. The Olympics are scheduled to start in Tokyo on July 23rd, 2021. There’s just one problem: if anyone says that they know exactly when this pandemic will be over, they are lying.
No one can see the future. The virus is an unknown player, and the best minds on Earth can’t do more than make educated guesses about what comes next and when. Hell, we didn’t even notice the blood clot situation until just recently.
I know. A guess is not comforting when you’re dreading another week of monotony in the same four walls. End dates are comforting. Reopenings are comforting. Contemplating a future that looks a lot like our cozy, crowded past is way more comforting than our isolated present. But let’s not confuse comfort for truth. a future that looks a lot like our cozy, crowded past is way more comforting than our isolated present
When bowling alleys and tattoo parlors reopened in Georgia on Friday, the pandemic was not over. It won’t be over when the stay-at-home order in Michigan (maybe) lifts on May 15th or if the stay-at-home order in the Bay Area actually ends on May 31st.
The dates politicians are throwing around are not finish lines. They aren’t guesses at an end date for this pandemic, either. Shelter-in-place orders are just time-outs. We have no sure-fire treatments for the virus, no vaccine, and a limited supply of health care workers. To keep as many people alive as possible, we’ve done the only thing we can do to slow the spread: we’ve hid from each other.
The virus’s effects have not been, as some proposed, a great equalizer. The less you have, the harder you’re hit. The federal government has mostly failed at leading a coherent response to the pandemic. Doctors are clashing with the FBI over PPE, then running into the ER with whatever they can scrounge up. Governors are hitting up their private-jet-owner friends to have masks flown in from China to equip their hospitals. Nurses at other facilities are resorting to wearing garbage bags in an unsuccessful bid to avoid contracting the virus on the job.
People who are already vulnerable are getting hit the hardest. Death rates have soared in black communities already slammed by other public health crises. On the Navajo Nation, experts worry that water shortages are contributing to the virus’s continued spread. The virus has raged through cramped homeless shelters and through the communities that can’t afford to distance themselves. “It’s become very clear to me what a socioeconomic disease this is,” an ER doctor working in Elmhurst, Queens told The New Yorker. “People hear that term ‘essential workers.’ Short-order cooks, doormen, cleaners, deli workers—that is the patient population here.” In some US prisons, the vast majority of inmates are testing positive for the virus, leaving incarcerated persons in fear for their lives. One inmate, Sterling Rivers, grimly observed that “Our sentences have turned into death sentences” in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. Our failures around the coronavirus are systemic failures of public policy. Thanks to an inconsistent and often incoherent government response in the US, we now face an uncertain timeline for both economic and health recoveries
Those failures have left the health care system struggling to cope, plunged society into a well of uncertainty, and sent the economy cratering. Thanks to an inconsistent and often incoherent government response in the US, we now face an uncertain timeline for both economic and health recoveries. Twenty-six million people have filed unemployment claims.
And so some governors will call an end to stay-home orders in the hopes of resuscitating their economies. In Georgia, South Carolina, and parts of Tennessee, that time came on Friday. Other states, like California and New York, are taking a longer view, gradually easing some restrictions on movement while enforcing new requirements — masks on, low temps, can’t lose.
As cases decrease, restrictions will relax. But once we let our guard down, we’ll likely see resurgences of cases, once again straining health resources — leaving us with no choice but to close ourselves off again. That’s what’s happening in parts of China now, where new outbreaks of the same disease have emerged. The open-and-shut economy will likely continue as cases ebb and flow.
There are paths to victory, but as Ezra Klein notes at Vox, “these aren’t plans for returning to anything even approaching normal.” Victory over the virus will involve a lot of things that we don’t have yet. Scientific discoveries will help defeat the virus — but science can’t do it alone. Public policies will play a huge role, and even with firm health guidelines and speedy scientific developments, it will take longer than we want for us to truly eke out a win.
What does a win look like? It will take widespread tests of everyone who might be sick and careful quarantining of anyone who tests positive. It will take armies of contact tracers to trace down anyone who might have been exposed. These low-tech interventions are the best thing we’ve got while we give researchers the time they need to come up with other solutions. Our brightest prospects — vaccines and treatments — are still in the minors
Scientists will labor over vaccines and treatments, but the overwhelming majority of their trials will turn up nothing useful. They’ll also keep trying to understand the virus and our bodies’ complicated response to it, in the hopes of developing legitimate antibody tests. Eventually, we may discover something that destroys the virus without wrecking our bodies. But none of that is ready today.
The end is still likely to be a long way away, as journalist Ed Yong writes in The Atlantic: “The pandemic is not a hurricane or a wildfire. It is not comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Such disasters are confined in time and space. The SARS-CoV-2 virus will linger through the year and across the world.”
Consider this a rebuilding year. It might even turn into rebuilding years, depending on our progress. Our brightest prospects — vaccines and treatments — are still in the minors. Even antibody testing isn’t ready to be called up to the big leagues, at least not yet.
This is a long game, and focusing on the victory celebrations — like New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio’s plan to “throw the biggest, best parade to honor” health care workers — won’t get us to the end. If we focus on what victory looks like instead of what it takes to get us there, we’re going to keep being disappointed
If we focus on what victory looks like instead of what it takes to get us there, we’re going to keep being disappointed. We’ll feel defeated every time a drug fails in testing. We can’t let it get to us like that. The parades, the ballgames, the worship services that we’re looking forward to, those will be there once this is over. What we’ve got to ensure now is that when we get to reopening day — whenever it is — that our concert halls and stadiums and spiritual homes are filled with as many of our human siblings as we can possibly save.
It still sucks when the goalposts move from April 15th to April 30th, then to May 15th. It feels like we’re Charlie Brown and the end to this is a football that Lucy keeps pulling away. But when it comes to the virus itself, the clock isn’t the statistic that matters. These are the ones that do: numbers of tests, numbers of new infections, and numbers of bodies in the morgues.
When the numbers of tests go up and confirmed cases and deaths go down, then our playbook will change. But it won’t be the end of the fight — not yet. We won’t be able to mark this finale in our calendars
We play this through to the end — there is no other option. Victory might look like a vaccine. It might look like a robust testing regime or a new treatment. It might look like us cobbling together a sense of normalcy and still watching for repeated outbreaks. Whatever form it takes, we’ll fight our way there with masks, thermometers, and soap, buying some time along the way. We’ll adjust our playbook as the virus adapts. We’ll position ourselves farther apart. We’ll do it again, and again when the next waves of this virus come. We will be exhausted when we get there, but we will get there. But if we don’t pace ourselves for the long haul, it will be that much harder to get through.
We won’t be able to mark this finale in our calendars. All we can do is get through today, pushing our leaders to get the people on the front lines the resources and time they need to get us through this. We need politicians who will stop telling us the comforting things we want to hear and start acting to keep as many of us alive as possible.
As wildfires burn across Canada, churches are finding ways to support their members and the broader community directly impacted by the crisis.
According to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, as of June 13, there are 462 active fires across Canada – and 236 of them classified as out of control fires.
Whether it’s through phone calls or donations to community members, here’s how a few churches across Canada are handling active wildfires and the aftermath in their regions.
Westwood Hills, N.S.: St. Nicholas Anglican Church
In Nova Scotia, St. Nicholas Anglican Church and other churches in the area are collecting money for grocery cards to give to families impacted by the Tantallon wildfire.
Right outside of Halifax, N.S., the Tantallon wildfire destroyed 151 homes. More than 16,000 people evacuated the area due to the fire.
The fire is now considered contained, but Tanya Moxley, the treasurer at St. Nicholas is organizing efforts to get grocery gift cards into the hands of impacted families.
As of June 12, four churches in the area – St. Nicholas, Parish of French Village, St Margaret of Scotland and St John the Evangelist – raised nearly $3,500. The money will be split for families’ groceries between five schools in the area impacted by the wildfire.
Moxley said she felt driven to raise this money after she heard the principal of her child’s school was using his own money to buy groceries for impacted families in their area.
“[For] most of those people who were evacuated, the power was off in their subdivision for three, four or five days,” she said. “Even though they went home and their house was still standing, the power was off and they lost all their groceries.”
Moxley said many people in the area are still “reeling” from the fires. She said the church has an important role to help community members during this time.
“We’re called to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and house the homeless and all that stuff, right? So this is it. This is like where the rubber hits the road.”
Mythologized in the legend of Robin Hood and lyricized in Les Misérables, it’s a debate as old as time: is it ever permissible to steal food? And if so, under what conditions? Now, amid Canada’s affordability crisis, the dilemma has extended beyond theatrical debate and into grocery stores.
Although the idea that theft is wrong is both a legally enshrined and socially accepted norm, the price of groceries can also feel criminally high to some — industry data shows that grocery stores can lose between $2,000 and $5,000 a week on average from theft. According to Statistics Canada, most grocery item price increases surged by double digits between 2021 and 2022. To no one’s surprise, grocery store theft is reportedly on the rise as a result. And if recent coverage of the issue rings true, some Canadians don’t feel bad about shoplifting. But should they?
Kieran Oberman, an associate professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom, coined the term “re-distributive theft” in his 2012 paper “Is Theft Wrong?” In simplest terms, redistributive theft is based on the idea that people with too little could ethically take from those who have too much.
“Everybody, when they think about it, accepts that theft is sometimes permissible if you make the case extreme enough,” Oberman tells me over Zoom. “The question is, when exactly is it permissible?”
Almost no one, Oberman argues, believes the current distribution of wealth across the world is just. We have an inkling that theft is bad, but that inequality is too. As more and more Canadians feel the pinch of inflation, grocery store heirs accumulate riches — Loblaw chair and president Galen Weston, for instance, received a 55 percent boost in compensation in 2022, taking in around $8.4 million for the year. Should someone struggling with rising prices feel guilty when they, say, “forget” to scan a bundle of zucchini?
UPDATE 07/18/2023: A coalition of groups arranged a bus to relocate refugees to temporarily stay at a North York church on Monday evening, according to CBC, CP24 and Toronto Star reports.
Canadians live in a time of threadbare morality. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Toronto’s entertainment district, where partygoers delight in spending disposable income while skirting refugees sleeping on sidewalks. The growing pile of luggage at the downtown corner of Peter and Richmond streets resembles the lost baggage section at Pearson airport but is the broken-hearted terminus at the centre of a cruel city.
At the crux of a refugee funding war between the municipal and federal governments are those who have fled persecution for the promise of Canada’s protection. Until June 1, asylum seekers used to arrive at the airport and be sent to Toronto’s Streets to Homes Referral Assessment Centre at 129 Peter St. in search of shelter beds. Now, Toronto’s overcrowded shelter system is closed to these newcomers, so they sleep on the street.
New mayor Olivia Chow pushed the federal government Wednesday for at least $160 million to cope with the surge of refugees in the shelter system. She rightly highlights that refugees are a federal responsibility. In response, the department of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada points to hundreds of millions in dollars already allocated to cities across Canada through the Interim Housing Assistance Program, while Ontario says it has given nearly $100 million to organizations that support refugees. But these efforts are simply not enough to deliver on Canada’s benevolent promise to the world’s most vulnerable.
The lack of federal generosity and finger-pointing by the city has orchestrated a moral crisis. It’s reminiscent of the crisis south of the border, where Texas governor Greg Abbott keeps bussing migrants to cities located in northern Democratic states. Without the necessary resources, information, and sometimes the language skills needed to navigate the bureaucratic mazes, those who fled turbulent homelands for Canada have become political pawns.
But Torontonians haven’t always been this callous.
In Ireland Park, at Lake Ontario’s edge, five statues of gaunt and grateful refugees gaze at their new home: Toronto circa 1847. These statues honour a time when Toronto, with a population of only 20,000 people, welcomed 38,500 famine-stricken migrants from Ireland. It paralleled the “Come From Away” event of 9/11 in Gander, N.L., where the population doubled overnight, and the people discovered there was indeed more than enough for all. It was a time when the city lived up to its moniker as “Toronto, The Good.”
Now, as a wealthy city of three million people, the city’s residents are tasked with supporting far fewer newcomers. Can we not recognize the absurdity in claiming scarcity?
