The Pandemic turns four

Four years.

This week, four years ago, my kids had a PA day followed by a snow day, followed by a school day, followed by nothing. Schools shut down. Game over for Grade One.

(For us. We were the nervous anglos who refused to send out kids back to school in May but schools did go back in May).

So much has changed in four years and yet, entire years have evaporated from view. Where it felt like time had stopped from March 2020 until March 2022, looking back, we can barely be bothered to even think about those early pandemic days. And why would we? The anxiety, the fear and worry, the constant stories of death and illness — there’s only so much of that in a constant stream we can take.

But then again, there were things that were beautiful too. There was Spring. Quiet streets. Forced closures. The largest social program ever made in Canada’s history, delivered in just a few weeks. There was some hope, amid the daily routine of listening to the radio and being closed in.

I was in a bar recently talking to someone I had just met about these early days. She laughed at me for having been locked down. “That means your job wasn’t essential. Do you know where I was? Work. My job was essential.”

She was right. My jobs evaporated. When they came back, one of my jobs was handed to a Liberal whose politics better aligned with the publication. Fine. My new friend’s job was essential. She worked on an assembly line making … something. I don’t recall what. I remember thinking it wasn’t all that essential either, but in the words of Harsha Walia, essential worker only means that you’re essential to capitalism.

The biggest lessons though of the pandemic have been elusive. It seems that we’ve all given up hope that any largescale, systemic options are possible. For every post I see that proposes action to make the big changes we need, I see 50 posts that encourages people to take small, individual actions. We’ve taken their bait!

Even today, after 4 years living with this virus, I’m not sure that a majority of people would answer this question properly: where is the riskiest place to be to catch COVID? They might say things like “in a factory” (risky!), or “in a slaughterhouse” (very risky!) or a the grocery story (not all that risky!) But the answer is this: at home. It’s always been the most dangerous place to catch COVID — in your bedroom, at home.

If it’s impossible to isolate at home, and for many people it is, then it becomes a battle to keep COVID outside of the home. Therefore, we need to keep it outside of schools, of gyms, of the workplace, and so on. That’s all very solid logic. Except the virus is an expression of class and race relations. We can keep COVID out of our workplaces as easily as we can keep it out of our homes — if you live in a single, detatched dwelling with an ensuite, it’s easy. If you work in a university as a tenured professor, no problem. If you live in an apartment or you’re a janitor, it becomes way more difficult.

The home was rarely mentioned as a battleground against COVID. There were small pilot projects that gave people places to isolate in some cases, but these programs were not widespread and did not last longer than the second wave, mostly. And yet, with a third of Canadians living in apartments where they have no control over the air they breathe, they were told to take personal precautions outside the home to protect themselves, as COVID seeped in through the air vents or the HVAC system.

Consider this poll done by the BCCDC in May 2020. I’m doing this off the top of my head because i only have 20 more minutes to finish writing this. They surveyed several hundred thousand British Columbians and asked: are you taking COVID precautions? An overwhelming majority of them said yes — something like 92%. But then asked the same question if they were taking COVID precautions at work, the number dropped to just under 45%.

We can’t do these things by ourselves. We can’t will COVID to not impact us. We can’t mask or vaccinate ourselves into safety — something that was clear as day in 2020 and somehow, that many people have put a solid 75% of their hope into. But hope needs to go beyond individual measures. We need improvements to public health, which can be made, we just need to organize. That’s all this is about. Organizing.

Back in October, I got to read Spin Doctors for the first time since August 2021 for the audio book. The world of publishing runs on grants and amazingly, a grant came through for us to be able to pay for this project (AUDIO BOOK IS OUT ON APRIL 16!) And I had forgotten so much about the first 18 months of the pandemic. It was wild to relive those moments, the fear, the anxiety and the perverted hope.

But on this fourth anniversary, I think about just how much more needs to be done to clean common air, especially in apartments, and to root out social inequality. Because if we don’t attack these issues at the root, we’ll never make this place safer for everyone.