Date of Entry: March 20th, 2020Last Friday, I woke up to a still silence. The majority of my housemates had already left to Toronto, and the usual rumbling of buses outside was indistinct. It was 11 AM; but having had nothing scheduled for that day anyways, I laid unassumingly in bed for another hour, watching the soft daylight filter through my blinds.
It turned out to be a strange day — oddly mundane, and yet oddly surreal. When I first checked my phone and discovered that all in-person lectures and exams were ending, I didn't even know how to react. Part of me had expected this, while the other was nonetheless taken aback.Trying to make sense of and accept the recent timeline of events was especially difficult. Only two weeks prior, I travelled to Greece. Then one week prior, I was on the verge of travelling again to Kingston (it wasn't until Wednesday when I'd decided not to). Come Thursday, and the university had abruptly renounced nearly all student activities.
Then, on Friday...Everything. Cancelled.
I wasn't sure at that point if I was going to fly back to Winnipeg, or remain in Hamilton for an indefinitely long time. Within hours, minutes — seconds even, I felt myself grow from being merely a distant spectator, to a live witness of the pandemic unfolding. For once, nearby grocery shelves were emptied of toilet paper, rice, and disinfectant. Moreover, the streets became eerily void of pedestrians.
The reality of the disease was suddenly raining down on me, in a way that was both humbling and discomfiting. I couldn't help but think: despite I'd been following the news since January; despite the fact that I had family members in Wuhan; and despite that, for weeks, my mom had warned me of the impending severity of the outbreak, I was naïve.
Now having spent a week in my own company (and with the unexpected burden of time), I've decided to unpack some of my thoughts in written form. And I suppose that that's an unforeseen good that emerges from being quarantined: in the unusual face of my own existence, I'd learned to better appreciate the present, revisit what I'm grateful for, and overall, become more mindful.
This week's thoughts...
Support the Society that Supports You
Healthcare. Peace.
All my life, I'd been privileged with such basic securities. I could go to the hospital, anticipating treatment. I could respond to government actions, without facing consequences. These are privileges that have manifested from centuries of efforts, of pain, and of suffering — yet privileges turned expectations, as we progress further into the 21st Century.
The intricate systems we've created to support our modern necessities — whether they be economies, healthcare networks, or governments — only function sufficiently given multi-level cooperation and maintained variables. However, like many, I've rarely paused to take in its grandeur, nor to appreciate the finer workings underpinning our social stability. After all, it's easy to lose touch with such details amid the chaos of our everyday lives, as we move swiftly between one system to another. In simply going to school, for example, most of us would know little about the public transit system we took to get there, the engineering that went into supporting the ceiling above our heads, nor the agricultural source of the snack we'd munched on. Yet in spite of our ignorance, we still take it for granted that everything should remain readily available, and operate as is.
COVID-19 could easily burgeon to become the "World War" of our generation; it serves as a testament to whether or not we as individuals can handle such crises, and whether our social frameworks are able to support such an unprecedented encumbrance. Seeing the immense pressure and disruption it'd imposed both in Canada and (more so) around the world, had pushed me to better acknowledge my aforementioned privileges growing up. It'd also made me more vigilant of how we ought to protect them in the future.
Healthcare
After reading and watching countless news reports, anecdotes from abroad, and documentaries, I began thinking more about the physicians and nurses working tirelessly at the forefront of the outbreak; the lab workers performing thousands of tests; the hospital directors scrambling every day to enact new courses of action; and the various other healthcare workers facing an added risk of infection in simply doing their job.And then I thought about how limited our resources actually are. Respiratory masks are effectively at a shortage, let alone the hospital beds and ventilators necessary in treating the approximately 20% of cases. Should there be an aggressive spike in prevalent cases, then the same healthcare system that'd promptly supported us all along will be too overwhelmed to deliver adequate treatment to those in need. Inevitably more people will die of unnecessary causes, as doctors are forced to triage on the meager basis of supply and demand.
Peace
After hearing the story of Chinese doctor Li Wenliang and about the catastrophic situation in Iran, it'd made me realize how much of disease control and tragedy avoidance is also political in nature. Although China managed to dramatically decrease their number of new cases, in denying initial responsibility and then clamping down their iron fist, many people have also faced unethical oppression and unwarranted suffering along the way.In recent days, the provincial and federal governments of Canada have requested firmly for us to practice good hygiene, stay at home, and to avoid social gatherings. Moreover, they have mandated closures of certain businesses, and cancelled the vast majority of events. Had the government made a poor decision on our behalf, we would've had the right to voice our opinions. For that, I'm thankful. And had the government been terribly unstable or untrustworthy in the past, we would've been unlikely to obey such financially- and socially-restraining orders. I'm also thankful that that hadn't been so much the case.In the midst of a disease outbreak, there turns out to be an extremely fine balance between maintaining law and order, and descending into chaos and mismanagement. We're at a critical early stage of the epidemiological curve, at which we all need to cooperate and make sound group judgments about what to do next. This is essential in mitigating panic, maintaining amicable relationships, and ensuring that the curve flattens.Should we all choose to continue indulging in our own liberty, it'll leave our government no choice but to adopt authoritarianism and execute punishment, in order to preserve the integrity of our systems. Peace is fragile — it's up to us to maintain it.
There's a worrisome narrative being spread online that the COVID-19 pandemic is merely analogous to the flu, that it's non-threatening, or that it's an overreaction. What troubles me even more is that much of it comes from influential political spokespeople, who use their passionate partisan fanbase as a means of fuelling deadly misinformation. While we shouldn't necessarily condemn people for their ignorance, it's crucial that we advocate for what the researchers and health experts say, and make sure that as many people as possible are compliant with social distancing guidelines. As an introduction to the topic, I highly recommend watching this video, reading this article, or listening to this podcast.
Several compounding variables — such as the number of severe cases, and lack of herd immunity — put vulnerable populations at an unknowingly higher risk of further health complications (due to irreversible tissue damage), or death. And although young healthy people are in fact at very low risk of dying from the disease, they serve as optimal vectors of transmission. Thus the case fatality rate of between 1-3.4% is a very low-resolution glimpse into the full picture.
Think of healthcare, think of peace.Wash your hands frequently, and avoid social contact. Respect grocery limits, and be mindful of those around you. Remain calm, remain careful.For years, we've been supported by the diligent work of others, and the systems that'd upheld our functioning as a society. Now, in the face of a global emergency, it's largely our responsibility to give back.
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