Diary: Living with a pandemic 30 (Sunday 19 April 2020)

The tension is rising…

We have reached a point where the patience of many people is wearing thin. Staying home for long periods, with little to ease boredom takes its toll.

Newspaper are full of negative news, more cases, more deaths, more time in basic quarantine or at least that is what it feels like. There are more reports of domestic strife. More attention is being paid to mental health concerns. Alberta just announced this week a plan to inject millions of dollars into program to provide assistance and counseling to those who are feeling overwhelmed with the prospects of sickness and death, or the loss of jobs and careers.

Those in charge are showing the stress of living with programs they have developed or have to administer 24/7. They are continually asked when it will end, and the answer is always the same: no one knows.

We hear more bleating from individuals who decry the restrictions around physical distancing and who think everyone should just get back to work. People ae restless and do want to get back to work. In a few areas in the US they have been holding public demonstrations demanding the lifting of physical distancing regulations.

Politicians are moving back to the sniping we usually see among that group with remonstrations about how the crisis was allowed to intrude uncontrolled and whether measures are effective as they could be. Blame is being assigned to those where the pandemic first arose that will undoubtedly fester in the months to come as economies struggle to stabilized.

People are reaching out to each other virtually and electronically, but you can hear the frustration of being alone. My 85-year old aunt messaged me yesterday, “My great-great-grandson was born in February and my great-granddaughter was born April 10th. Can't get to see them as I'm isolated.” This is a lady who is widowed (she lost her second husband last year), had four children (one died two years ago), and presently has 11 grandchildren, 14 great-grandchildren and now two great-great-grandchildren. They all live quite close to her and have been an integral part of her life with frequent visits and family gatherings. She is the most up-beat person in our family and the physical distancing is hard on her.

More pets are being adopted as people seek to fill their empty hours with animals instead of other people. You have to worry whether these cats and dogs will suffer themselves after the lives of their owners resume.

Few people are alive that lived through the 1918 event. Others choose to ignore the lessons of that contagion. These people have not read or heard about the experiences of past pandemics such as the one in 1918 Spanish Flu. At that time people kept apart voluntarily and by government edict. There was mandatory use of face masks in many areas, with people being fined for not wearing them in public. 

In Canada over 50,000 people died, 4,000 of them in Alberta. Soldiers arrived home from the European front to find most of their family dead.

Restrictions were eventually relaxed after the major spread in 1918. What happened was a second powerful wave from a mutated version of the virus that killed thousands more.

Those that cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it (George Santayana , 1905: The Life of Reason).

We would do well to remember the lessons of the past. The Covid-19 pandemic is not different that what transpired in 1918. It just has acted faster, probably mostly due to the speed in which people can now travel to spread it. And it probably just as deadly.