Sunday morning, my husband and I watched actor Laurence Fishburne speak on COVID-19. “If you don’t know anyone who is sick yet,” he said — we didn’t — “you can also bet that that is going to change.” It did.
Sunday afternoon we got the news that my husband’s aunt in the Peterborough area was diagnosed with the virus, and is now one of Ontario’s 1,706 (and counting) confirmed cases.
Last week, or a week into Canada’s lockdown, our aunt began to cough and feel very ill. She went to the hospital Friday and was told the diagnosis Sunday. She and her husband had not travelled anywhere recently. They had shut themselves in when the call to distancing went out. They don’t know how she got the virus. Her husband who has been with her the whole time has headaches but no other symptoms and has been told he doesn’t need to be tested yet. The silver lining is she is feeling better than she did last week and is recovering at home.
The news of her illness made me realize that until Sunday I was still processing COVID-19 in a psychologically distanced manner, undertaking self-isolation with a duty of responsibility and caution, but admittedly with a sense of imperviousness. Our aunt’s diagnosis brought the reality crashing down: this virus is closer than I had thought.
A new Angus Reid poll found that one in eight Canadian adults think the threat of the COVID-19 outbreak is “overblown,” that they are therefore less inclined to follow precautions such as not shaking hands with strangers, staying away from public spaces, washing hands more frequently or even keeping extra personal distance from people.
However, the illness impacts us in ways not captured in the tick tock of numbers of cases and deaths.
My mother-in-law has been in a Toronto long-term care home since last year fighting a decade-long battle against Parkinson’s and now advancing dementia. She is in her 60s. It’s difficult to know how much she absorbs of what we say, but the family kept up steady visits. We believed seeing familiar people must be comforting to her at some level. Certainly, her usually glazed eyes brightened up when she saw our children.
Now, with nursing homes (rightly) locked down, even that contact is gone. It’s impossible to have any real interaction on Skype or FaceTime, though the staff tries it. Touch is the biggest loss of all, a non-verbal communication critical in ways we don’t realize until it’s taken away. Stroking her hand or her shoulder calmed her. Kissing her on the forehead told me instantly if she needed to be moisturized or was due for a bath.
It’s as if she’s being prematurely snatched away from us.
I don’t know how the already overworked and underpaid staff are holding up without any relief from visitors. My father-in-law used to time his daily visits to coincide with mealtimes. My mother-in-law often dips a fork in her food or puts her fingers around a bun and forgets the next step. She requires a dedicated companion. His presence at the table used to mean one less intensive task for the harried staff.
Personal support workers in long-term care, disproportionately female and racialized, have long been undervalued despite their critical function in an aging society. This crisis has proven our collective cheapness costly. Unless they can afford to live in somewhat spacious homes, how can staff self-isolate outside the nursing home environment?
Nine residents have died of COVID-19 complications in Pinecrest Nursing Home in Bobcaygeon, about 150 kilometres northeast of Toronto. Dozens of other residents are ill. At least 34 of the facility’s 66 staff members are experiencing symptoms of COVID-19.
The menace of the virus hangs over the world. In India, which has thus far been relatively unscathed with about 1,000 cases, almost as many people have died from the mandatory lockdown as have died from COVID-19.
As cities shuttered along with shops and businesses, India’s poorest workers who often live where they work were left homeless, jobless and penniless. The government provided a woefully inadequate number of buses to take workers back to their villages hundreds of kilometres away. Daily wage workers began the long trek back.
One man died of exhaustion after walking 200 kilometres. At least one child died of hunger. Others were hit by trucks on highways and killed. Elsewhere, road closures forced four people in a family, including a baby, to go through a forest where they perished in a forest fire. The reported death toll related to the lockdown is 22 but the real numbers are expected to be far higher.
Closer to home, the unpredictable pandemic pulsates erratically at our border. The Johns Hopkins University map tracker shows an ominously growing sea of red dots spreading uncontrollably across the United States. But its vulgar leader was busy tweet-boasting the high ratings of his coronavirus updates on television.
As the news gets grimmer and the novelty of distancing wears off in the coming days, I expect people will go through a trauma overload. This could lead to some of us shutting down. I suppose this is natural, but I suggest we try to do the opposite.
Those among us who have not yet lost jobs could use this time to lobby on social media or email for those who have even less, donate at least the money saved in gas and Presto cards to charities, and reach out not just to friends but to neighbours we don’t ordinarily think of.
This giving is not to be confused with generosity. In the end it will all amount to self-care.