Virus fatigue takes control
This wave much harder than first
As one long, dispiriting year rolls into the next, COVID-19 infections in Ontario continue to rise. The warnings sounded last summer, that the second wave of this pandemic would be worse than the first, have come true, fuelled in part by the sheer exhaustion people are feeling, buttressed by mixed messages and ever-changing directives from authorities and incomplete or misinformation.
It hasn't helped that, as members of the public have hunkered down in their homes and grown wearier by the day, high-profile officials and lawmakers have ignored public-health recommendations, either on the sly, as was the much-publicized case involving now-former Ontario finance minister Rod Phillips, or, in the case of outspoken MPP Randy Hiller, in open defiance of those directives.
“Anything that lasts this long is going to create a sense of fatigue with people in terms of staying vigilant and doing what they were doing really well in the early days of this,” says David Coletto, professor of political management at Carleton University and CEO of Abacus Data. “But it's a lot harder to get people to continue to do it.
“And, when you see that many of the folks who make the rules aren't following them themselves, it makes it harder to justify continuing doing it.”
Josh Greenberg, professor and director of Carleton's School of Journalism and Communication, agrees, noting that although the first wave was completely unknown territory, it was in some ways easier to navigate than the current one.
“People are exhausted emotionally, physically, and many people are suffering economically,” he says. “That weighs on an entire community, and we're now seeing some real lines of fracture that are quite different from what we saw in the first stage of the pandemic. There was a real united front then: everybody in this together, little questioning of decision-making, little questioning of the authorities, and certainly what I would call a consensus among our political elites.
“But now, with the economic consequences and fallout, and just the length of the pandemic, we're seeing that it's starting to wear on everybody. And so now we're starting to see cracks in that sphere of consensus.”
Much of the blame, Greenberg believes, lies at the feet of political leaders who haven't provided an environment that encourages or inspires resilience. He points to schools as an example, where authorities knew last summer what measures were needed to make them safe for students to return to in the fall, yet failed to implement many of them.
“So now we're faced with having to lock everything down again. And, unless those measures are put in place, we're just going to repeat the cycle.
“This is a real test of political leadership. It's a test of public trust and a real test of how we communicate risk and how we engage the community in protective measures. We've never had to do this before, so we're learning a lot as we go.”
Communication from officials to the public, Coletto says, has been incomplete, leaving many to question what they're being told.
“When I hear political leaders and health experts explain new restrictions or why they don't want us to travel, or why they want us to stay home, it feels to me like the explanation lacks the `Here's why.' They talk about models, but most people don't understand that, and so it's hard to get buy-in and constrain people's behaviours.”
Coletto adds that he empathizes with people's questioning of certain lockdown measures when the data behind them is incomplete or not forthcoming.
“I don't blame people for saying, `I don't see the evidence that going to a restaurant is a problem, or that an 8 p.m. curfew is going to fundamentally change the outcome.' People aren't explaining that.”
Additionally, the media landscape is an increasingly noisy one, with traditional public-health voices competing for attention with everything from questioning or dissenting opinions to those wilfully spreading disinformation.
Among the high-profile figures challenging Ontario's lockdown measures is Hillier, the independent MPP from Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston.
Hillier, who in November was charged under the Reopening Ontario Act after organizing an anti-COVID-19-lockdown rally outside Queen's Park in Toronto, provocatively posted a photo on social media on Dec. 27, showing himself with 14 others around his dining table, unmasked and clearly contravening the province's lockdown regulations.
Hillier believes the risks posed by COVID-19 have been grossly overstated and the measures taken to combat it have caused more damage — to the economy, to people's mental health — than the virus itself. He points to faulty testing, asymptomatic cases and deaths chiefly among the elderly with other underlying conditions as factors that mitigate against restrictions, while comparing the virus that causes COVID-19 to the common cold or flu.
“Why,” he asks in one video, “are so many people living in, with such concern, in such dread, and taking such precautions for something, for a virus, a coronavirus, that is more like the common cold than it isn't?”
He argues, too, that democracy is being stilted during the pandemic, with leaders avoiding debate and ruling by edict.
Many people worry that Hillier's messaging is dangerous. Dr. Jeanette Dietrich, a family physician in Sydenham, north of Kingston — in Hillier's riding — created an online petition that now bears nearly 4,000 signatures, including from numerous medical professionals. In it, Dietrich accuses Hillier of spreading misinformation and misusing scientific references, and urges others to ignore the MPP.
“It's frustrating for all of us in health care who are working very hard to try to get the message out,” Dietrich said last week. “I have patients saying to me all the time that they are doing their utmost to protect themselves and they do not want to get this disease … so, yes, it's frustrating when you're trying to care for these people and you feel you're fighting against this other tide of misinformation, instead of everyone working together to encourage people to do the best they can to follow the guidelines and recommendations.”
In response, Hillier last week said, “I will not be silenced.”
Greenberg notes that such controversies, as well as revelations of government officials failing to practise what they preach, “chip away in quite a profound way at public trust.
“When that happens at a time when people are already exhausted and still scared, and facing a far greater risk now of mass infection than we were a year ago, it's really dangerous.”
Coletto doesn't see Hillier's campaign, in particular, gaining many converts. “I don't see evidence of a movement building to resist these restrictions,” he says. “All the evidence I see in the polling, whether it's ours or others', suggests that the vast majority of Ontarians and Canadians are still aware of the risk and generally support actually more restrictions, not less.
“People still see this as a health risk.”
Yet as the pandemic wears on, the public, confronted by confusing messaging, has increasingly taken to making its own decisions about what it feels is best, often countering regulations and recommendations. Greenberg points to the increase in people gathering with other households over Christmas as an example, comparing it to people briefly falling off a diet.
“They're committed to the plan,” he says, “but what we saw over the holidays was people giving themselves permission to cheat, and they were giving themselves permission to cheat because they were taking their cues from leaders.”
The announcement of the Dec. 26 lockdown by Ontario Premier Doug Ford, made four days beforehand, was another mixed message, Greenberg notes, a warning that seemed to allow people to finish their shopping and get Christmas dinners out of the way before buckling down.
“What people really struggle with is uncertainty,” he says, “and political leadership and strong risk communication have to guide people through periods of heightened uncertainty, and that's what we're living through right now.
“You need leadership and communication that's consistent, decisive, transparent and empathetic. When we don't see consistency, when we don't see decisiveness, and the information seems to be hidden or incomplete, or when leaders are not being empathetic, either by the way they're communicating or through their actions, people lose trust, and that's what I think we're seeing, the reckoning of that.”