This isn't the time to ease up on COVID restrictions

It looks like the not-so-great return to the office is about to start. At least for 200 or so federal government employees, dubbed “pathfinders,” trudging back to their drab towers. It scares me because I can't see a smooth path to re-entry. Just a bunch more misery ahead.

At the moment, the return to in-person work appears to be voluntary, but at some point we can expect employers to require our physical presence, at least some of the time. I dread that day. Sure, I miss people — up to a point, anyway. And it's true that being in a professional setting affords you many networking opportunities you don't have rocking your WFH bottoms on Zoom.

But we've now been dealing with this pandemic for (count fingers, add toes) 17 months and if there's one thing we should have learned by now it's this: We don't know how to be patient. Or careful. We are in such a rush to get back to normal that we keep delaying it by easing up on restrictions way too fast.

Exponential rates of infection, lockdown, relax too hard. We've done that thrice and are about to experience it for the fourth time. Why?

I can do my work from home for as long as it takes. Professionally the pandemic isn't really affecting me. I'm not asking for precautions for myself. I'm asking for my friend whose dojo keeps shutting down, and for the folks who work in industries deemed “non-essential” such as tourism, personal services or restaurants. And school kids. Every time we reopen too soon only to shut down again, we punish them. And to top it all off, the provincial government is refusing to consider implementing a vaccine passport that would help those small businesses stay open safely even with reduced capacity.

Ottawa has admirable rates of full vaccination. Unfortunately, this doesn't include children under 12, who are vulnerable to the Delta variant, according to many medical specialists, and the so-called “vaccine hesitant,” who are going to plunge us back into despair and ensure the pandemic keeps going by giving the virus plenty of time to mutate into forms that may get through our fully vaccinated shield.

I heartily agree with Mark Sutcliffe's excellent column in the Citizen last week in which he says that “the vaccine question has become an illuminating test of judgment and critical thinking.”

And those who put all of us at risk because they distrust science or are gullible enough to believe COVID-19 is some government plot — well, I don't want them anywhere near decision-making authority for anything more significant than their backyard shed. And maybe not even that.

Ditto for those who refuse to wear masks. We know masks work. Not perfectly by themselves, but in addition to other measures, such as vaccination and distancing where possible, they offer a pretty good return on investment for the level of effort ( just practising my office talk, don't mind me). You know what else works? Frequent and thorough handwashing. Remember the songs we used to hum in March 2020 while we went about scrubbing between fingers? It's time to bring them back out of the closet along with whatever real clothes still fit.

We are at a crossroads. Most of you have spent the pandemic doing the right thing. If “most of you” was “all of you,” we'd be done with this thing. Alas.

Many people are on the verge of a mental health breakdown, including kids who have had it up to here with asynchronous learning. Humans are social animals. We need to get back to in-person living, but — and this is the crucial part — not without proper safety measures to guard against exponential rates of infection followed by lockdown. We need to accept that we may never get back to the way things were. That the best we can hope for is “almost normal” for the largest number of people, and resolutely aim for that. Slowly and carefully.