Let's hold it together on COVID
Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/
The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats wrote The Second Coming a century ago, at the end of the First World War, at the beginning of the Irish War of Independence, and in the midst of the flu pandemic. I think about this poem, the staple of a very solid public education, a lot these days. He may as well have written it (at least the first stanza) for what we are experiencing now.
That blood-dimmed tide we were warned about so consistently is upon us, COVID-19's second wave. Every day, some new record is broken in the number of infections recorded in any given province. Even the famed “Atlantic bubble” has failed.
The worst, filled with their passionate intensity, generate headlines for spitting on or punching fellow citizens over a mask mandate, as they have done in British Columbia. In Alberta, they leak documents further exacerbating the painfully obvious awkwardness between senior public health officials and the Jason Kenney government over how to fight the pandemic. And in Etobicoke, they cry out that this is Canada, not North Korea, in support of a rogue restaurant owner charged for refusing to follow public health orders.
We, the falcons, are tuning out the falconers — in this case public health officials who, after many months, have yet to twig that the dulcet tones of their gentle exhortations and cajoling have become white noise against this backdrop of chaos. No longer do we gush over cool scientists who wear Fluevog shoes and periodic table dresses. They've started to sound like mom. I love my mom; she is the best. She reminds me daily to take my vitamins. I confess, I've tuned her out too.
Marketers spend months hundreds of millions trying to figure out the messaging — and the medium — to keep an old message or product new and relevant. The speed of this infection's spread has prevented a lot of the prep work associated with effective messaging. And the government marketing budgets are a fraction of a fraction of
Apple's. But here's a hint: Try some new voices, some new lines. Oh, and instead of long lists of what people can't or shouldn't do — lists that change constantly — try keeping the messages simple and consistent.
The centre is not holding. How can it in the face of fatigue and ennui? The novel coronavirus is novel no more. It is a shadowy presence that hangs over us, taking our livelihoods, taking our loved ones, and literally permeating the air we breathe. The esprit de corps we felt through the spring when the fight was new is long gone, replaced with a desperate search for encouraging news about an end to our troubles.
As we approach the darkest part of the year, we are told that we will likely have to wait much longer than we wish for the vaccinations that will eventually end the pandemic. If announcements from Moderna and Pfizer led us to envision spring vacations and in-person visits, the federal government told us this week that the period of full vaccine distribution will extend further than we hoped, and probably further than it should.
We cannot know how well or how badly our federal and provincial governments will operationalize the pandemic's endgame. What we do know is our public health infrastructure — both its systems, and its people, those exhausted nurses, doctors and support staff — cannot simultaneously manage treating the sick in a further surge of cases and the preparations required to heal us via vaccination.
Yeats' enduring words remind us human nature doesn't evolve nearly as well as technology. But there is no choice here. We cannot let things fall further apart. Hold the centre we must.