No. 19 - Our COVID summer
Last year at this time, I was waiting for edits for what would be one of the final rounds of writing for my book Spin Doctors. I was hopeful. Cases were very low. Vaccination was going well. Fears about the Delta variant were overblown, until the fall showed up and kicked us into a Delta-fueled wave. By then, it was December and I was trying to have a small, in-person book launch in Quebec City. An ice storm combined with an explosion of cases meant that almost no one came. Fine. FINE i told myself, drinking a bottle of wine that was meant to be split among 20 of my wellest wishers.
And so here we are, one year later. Things are much worse in pretty much every way. Today, in Quebec City, COVID-19 has knocked so many healthcare workers off work that it isn’t COVID-19 hospitalizations that experts are worried about, it’s the lack of staff. Staff are being told to come to work after five days, even if they’re still testing positive. It’s one of those kinds of tradeoffs that is bad till you think about who they might be able to help so maybe on the balance of things it’s ok, but then you think about what it means for them to be potentially contagous in high risk settings. Bad on bad on bad.
And yet, we are living like it’s 2019. The summer festival just finished. And while most of it happened outside, buses, packed as tight as possible, brought tens of thousands of people downtown and back home each night for two weeks. I went to one indoor show wearing a KN95. It was horrible to go to a rock show wearing a KN95 — uncomfortable, impossible to talk to anyone, hot — so i wasn’t too surprised to be the only one. It isn’t a stretch to see Quebec City’s hospital staffing crisis a direct result of the summer festival — 125,000 passes were sold (not including the pass renting to folks for specific shows).
Today, COVID-19 killed 35 people in Quebec. Last year on this date, the number was zero and in 2020, it was one. And that 35 isn’t an outlier for July 2022 — deaths have stayed around this for weeks. I also did an analysis of hospital admissions. Here’s where we are:
July 16 2020 - 233 people hospitalized, 15 in ICU
July 16 2021 - 55 people hospitalized, 22 in ICU (major vaccine effect there!)
July 12 2022 - 1724 people hospitalized (!!) 43 in ICU
As for infections, well (all for July 16):
137 confirmed in 2020.
81 confirmed cases on this day in 2021.
2061 confirmed cases last update (July 12)
And that figure is with restricted testing, so the number of cases is likely 10x times that or even more (testing is limited to healthcare workers, folks in residential care and whoever remembers to report their rapid tests).
(As I write this, the average R value in Quebec is tracked at 1.10 which means that for every person who is infected, they will infect 1.10 people — that’s growth that means we are on an upswing, though nothing near our peak at 2.6, and as of the end of June, 45% of all infections were the B.5 variant.)
These numbers are all from Quebec’s INSPQ because Quebec has the best data in Canada. Nowhere else can I easily see infection rates per day. What should concern the hell out of us is this: these infection numbers are extremely high. That’s *with* so much of our life happening outdoors. Unlike in previous years where a summer lull didn’t launch us immediately into a Fall wave (i.e. it took a month and a half before that happened), we will be starting September from a place of widespread infection. Unless COVID decides to finally fuck off, we are in for a lot more infections before the year is through.
What is probably most frustrating for me is that there’s no excuse for why there haven’t been emergency measures implemented. Those buses easily could have had mask mandates on them. Large indoor gatherings could too. There is so much space between lock down and literally nothing that it boggles the mind that we aren’t falling somewhere in between, considering these case numbers. What we’re dealing with now though is that COVID-19 is no longer mysterious. So many of us have had it. And if a majority of us who have had it didn’t experience symptoms worse than an average cold, trying to put the cat back into the bag of public health measures will be a difficult task that few governments are going to want to invoke.
Widespread experience with COVID-19 infection poses a new dilemma that is only solved with social solidarity: the instinct that it isn’t about me personally worrying I wont die (I didn’t die when I had it before!) but instead changing our collective approach to better protect those for whom COVID-19 poses a monumental risk. The problem is, as it has been all along, there is no interest from government to address this pandemic from a social solidarity perspective. And so, camps of people will continue to harden. People’s experience with COVID-19 will get even more sharply different and the only thing that will unite us is a fuming anger that COVID-19 is still here, with little common basis for what that actually means (a cancelled trip versus delayed surgey versus your ability to breathe versus having to still wear a mask at work).
And with even less uniting us than ever before, well, fuck.
Aside from social solidarity, governments have to really accept that the virus is in the air. That means we need clean AND filtered air indoors or in enclosed spaces like buses. If you can share the air with someone outside your household, you can share the virus too. If it’s there, you can inhale it when people talk. sing, shout or cough. Without accepting that basic physics and precaution as a public health purpose, the pandemic will continue. No wonder people are confused and throwing their hands up in the air.
I’m tired, yes, but not just of the long-time precautions and protections. I’m tired of the lack of them now and the government’s (and public health’s) “let it rip, screw the consequences” stance. It goes against everything I learned as an occupational health person about preventing harm — and yet our skills and knowledge have been dismissed, ignored or not used. It’ll take a brave person or organization or government to do the right thing. I’m just afraid it will get so bad they have no choice.