Little did we know virus would steal so much in a year

Can it be true? Is it possible that Niagara’s COVID-19 cases really have peaked, as acting medical officer of health Dr. Mustafa Hirji suggested last week?

It’s almost hard to remember the days when the coronavirus didn’t rule our lives; can it really be only a year?

Back on Jan. 24 last year, we printed our first local story about the mysterious virus that was sickening people in China. Seventeen people were dead there, another 600 laid ill. But really, we wondered, how bad could it be for us here in Canada?

“In terms of the risk to Niagara residents, the risk remains low,” a doctor with Niagara’s public health department said at the time.

Even so, we reported, Niagara health officials were “working actively” for its arrival which, we were told, was a matter of when, and not if.

Local hospitals and paramedics were aware of it and were preparing.

In an echo of warnings we would hear repeatedly over the coming months — and with very good reason — in that article another local health official advised:

“We want people to wash their hands, use hand sanitizer, stay home if they’re ill, cover their cough and just be mindful that we are in respiratory season.”

Little did they know. Little did any of us know.

The first case didn’t show up in Niagara for another two months, in mid-March. And they’ve never stopped since.

Now, we are 10 months deep into the pandemic and hoping that finally we have seen the worst.

When “progress” looks like 91 new cases and 1,509 active ones, like it did on Sunday, it shows that maybe we’ve become a little numb to the real devastation this virus has brought.

Ninety-one new cases only looks good because last week at this time there were 120 on that day, and 177 on the day before that. Is 1,509 total cases really something to be positive about? It is, when there were 1,750 seven days before that.

Recent news stories have stressed the shocking rate at which COVID-19 patients have been dying. It’s terribly grim; there is no nice way to write about it, and it must hurt to read it. In Saturday’s paper alone, five obituaries cited COVID-19 as a cause of death.

Since Dec. 22, Niagara Region Public Health has reported more than 150 deaths due to COVID-19.

In an online comment over the weekend, one reader wrote something to the effect of, isn’t COVID-19 scary enough? Do we have to focus on the deaths? Actually, yes. We do.

There are still way too many stories from here and across Canada of people flouting the rules, holding parties, bending the rules.

Unbelievably, there are still people holding protests against wearing masks, offering nonsensical reasons for refusing them.

We’re all feeling the fatigue of life during COVID-19. It’s exhausting.

Many of us don’t even get the break of leaving the house to go to work anymore. It’s like a lost luxury — and who ever thought we would look at it that way?

Vaccines offer us hope, but they’re in short supply still. And they were never going to get us through this anyway, at least not in the short term.

That still comes down to us making the effort to stay home when sick, wearing a mask in public and avoiding crowds.

Yes, it is the grunt work of being a pandemic fighter. And yes, we do have to talk about all the people who are dying. Those people are our neighbours and our family members.

They are us.