A much longer race

We were told it wasn’t going to be a sprint, it was going to be a marathon.

At least, that’s the way public health officials classed how we should handle COVID-19 as it developed from a new, localized virus into a global pandemic.

Turns out, it’s likely to be more of a massive endurance race than even a marathon.

It’s a race that, one way or another, may last for decades. Even though Canada is doing well in the health portion of the current crisis — and Atlantic Canada even better — the race is far from over.

“We know that the pandemic is much more than a health crisis, it is an economic crisis, a social crisis, and in many countries a political crisis,” World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a global online conference on Monday. “Its effects will be felt for decades to come.”

And at the moment, things are still getting worse.

The director-general’s comments came after Sunday saw a single-day record of 183,000 new cases of the virus in 24 hours — a period that also saw more than 4,700 deaths. The bulk of the new cases, by the way, were in Brazil (54,771) and the United States (36,617), both countries with governments that have downplayed the seriousness of the virus. Meanwhile, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a new forecast suggesting that deaths in the U.S. from the pandemic are likely to rise by 25,000 — to nearly 145,000 — by around July 11.

Ghebreyesus was blunt about how politics have affected the fight against the virus: “We cannot defeat this pandemic with a divided world,” he said. “The politicization of the pandemic has exacerbated it. None of us is safe until all of us are safe.” Does that mean gloom and doom and disaster? No. There are a couple of ways you can look at the pandemic: one, of course, is to not look at it at all — to put your head firmly in the sand and deny the obvious science. (You can’t make cases of the virus “disappear” by limiting testing for it, any more than you can keep other cars out of the intersection you’re driving into by simply refusing to look through the windshield.)

The other option is to roll up our sleeves — especially in this part of the world where cases are currently few and far between — and do everything we can to stall, slow or stop the virus, using everything at our disposal.

It does mean we’ll have to live more carefully — and live smarter — for a longer period than anyone might have expected at the outset of the pandemic.

We have to concentrate on working together, and putting aside the things that divide us

Finding solutions is where we can shine.