Alberta’s plans offer shallow reassurance
This is an experience you might already have had, or will soon: squinting nervously at a provincial government plan for lifting various aspects of the pandemic lockdown. On Thursday Alberta issued a prospectus for a three- stage scheme that includes the small additional bonus of liberating a few amenities immediately.
By the time you read this, some public lands and parks will have opened up to vehicles and boats in Alberta. Golf was a major focus of local discussion in Edmonton in March and April, partly because sportswriters had plenty of spare time and no other interests to speak of. Courses will be permitted to open on May 2, but clubhouses and pro shops stay closed until Stage 1 proper begins.
Stage 1 happens “as early as” May 14. This will involve careful and restricted unleashing of the retail economy. We are promised that visits to the hairdresser and barber will be possible — though this is of theoretical interest to your correspondent — and restaurants can even seat customers up to 50 per cent of their ordinary capacity.
There’s also a Stage 2, with no date attached, that will involve allowing “some larger” social gatherings — presumably including religious worship, weddings and obsequies. Cinemas, gyms, bars and rec centres stay closed all the way until Stage 3, a time of near-total liberation (albeit with public “physical distancing” still in place) whose start date is not yet known.
Somehow the language of Alberta’s “relaunch” brochure drives home the maddening uncertainty of it all. It is hard to tell exactly how successful we have been at fighting SARS- COV- 2. The overall reproduction rate of the virus here has definitely been above 1.0 recently, but that is attributable to the local explosion of cases in southern Alberta’s large meat-packing plants.
It is hard to say this in any way that doesn’t sound horrible, but those plants have inadvertently followed the famous “herd immunity” strategy in miniature: they will soon have many returning workers who can neither contract nor spread the bug any further. Outside the devastated packing plants ( and the homes of their workers), Alberta seems to have done fairly well. The entire city of Edmonton currently has only 85 known active cases, and intensive care units everywhere still attest to having an enormous amount of slack.
So the authorities are edging forward with a limited resumption of economic life despite uncertain provincewide epidemiological parameters. ( I can’t count how many times it’s struck me as weird that we are using “economic” loosely to denote the world beyond the threshold of the home, when in classical Greek “economy” meant the opposite.) But it is all very experimental.
Test and hospital-capacity indicia will be monitored continuously. We are warned in the brochure that, “There may be times we need to take a step back.” If Stage 1 causes a Black Friday- like frenzy of shopping and gourmandizing, and reproduction rates spike in urban areas, we will be back to Stage 0. We are also warned that the entire province may not move forward, or backward, in unison. Restrictions could be “removed or reapplied in some localized areas of the province.” Yes, we’re all in this together … for certain values of the word “we.”
While we are being offered a multi- stage scheme for liberation from lockdown, and we are no doubt happy to have it, no part of the plan is accompanied by explicit criteria of success. We are told what measures will be used by decision- makers, but not what specific numbers will allow us to advance to the next stage. The ambiguity that has always surrounded talk of “flattening the curve” haunts Stage 1 and its successors. We don’t have any idea what the famous “dance” of alternating restrictions and relaxations will look like — we can only listen for the tune.
I am not criticizing anyone for this. I do not intend to add to the millions of damn fool words that have already been scribbled blaming some person or institution or system or way of life for the behaviour of a virus. It would certainly be less stressful if we could believe the “investigators” in this experiment, our political leaders and public health officers, had a complete and clear picture of the future, a picture that they are simply refusing to share.
It might even be easier to live with the idea that they mean harm to us and are intentionally inflicting it for obscure conspiratorial reasons. Certainly there are people who have reached this conclusion, and certainly they seem to find some perverse comfort in it. There’s a part of my weary brain, today, that understands them a little.