How the West was lost to COVID-19
Iwrite, as ever, from the capital of Alberta, a province that is now sprinting toward Québécois levels of COVID-19 mortality and health- care chaos. On Wednesday afternoon, Alberta’s premier and its chief medical officer of health announced new restrictions on businesses and social gatherings in an effort to halt skyrocketing coronavirus case numbers. This might seem like an opportunity to report from the front lines of a place that is going belly-up when it comes to epidemic control, but what can I really tell you?
I don’t own a car, so my universe has shrunk a little every month since the crisis began. I was quick to cut longer transit trips out of my life; after a while, because mask use remained haphazard, enforcement is nonexistent and there are crazy or impaired people on every other downtown Edmonton bus, I began to curtail the shorter ones, too. In ordinary times I used to follow a rule against having groceries delivered, believing that if I couldn’t kill what I eat I could at least lug it a few blocks for the sake of the exercise. Delivery has become routine for me now — but, of course, delivery services came close to being overwhelmed in the spring wave, so a forced wintertime return to foot expeditions seems possible.
Since I’m trying to spread out drugstore visits ( it turns out drugstores are full of sick people — who knew), and elective shopping and socializing have become distant memories, I can’t convey colourful impressions of an infested city. I see a very small grey strip of it, and on most days not even that.
I was well prepared for “pandemic fatigue”; I told myself in the spring that 2020 was just going to be a blank square in my life as far as ordinary human activity went. But I didn’t envision the second wave clearly — and please remember that all the virus “skeptics” still strutting their skepticism were skeptical that there would be a seasonal second wave. The peak of the Canadian flu season, in ordinary years, coincides pretty closely with the new year. This year, flu’s out; super-flu’s in.
So if it’s colour you want, you’ve come to the wrong place, unless you’re eager for a hibernating bear to describe the walls of his cave. Alberta’s new epidemic regulations arrived late and have been critiqued for insufficient harshness. Certainly there is a signalling aspect to Wednesday’s announcement: the details might be genuinely less important than the mere fact that an announcement was made.
But public health folk without official positions, who are explicitly appealing for us to adopt the Swedish system in which an epidemiologist becomes a Roman dictator in wartime, don’t seem to realize that there is no point in declaring harsh measures when you can’t persuade people to comply with the trivially soft ones, and can’t police them either.
Mask use in indoor settings never came close to 100 per cent in my part of Edmonton. Retailers who try to enforce mask rules have been greeted with everything from violence to excrement, and anyone who tries to exclude a customer armed with some bogus health pretext is facing possible legal action. And in Western cities bus drivers sometimes get assaulted merely for trying to collect tickets and fares; there is, simply, no way to oblige passengers to wear masks, and no one tries, and I wouldn’t think of expecting them to.
You can punish some bricksand-mortar businesses who fail to comply with the law, and if they’re especially irresponsible you ought to; but we honestly don’t seem to have any idea whether this is an important or useful infection-control target at the wider scale. Alberta adopted a smartphone contact- tracing system that doesn’t really work; the government’s being challenged for not having adopted the federal tracing app, which might not be any use either.
There is a tumult within officialdom over who can win the
most brownie points for being “evidence-based,” but in a country that can’t keep simple up- to- date counts of the number of people who die from any cause, did we expect to be able to create an accurate real- time atlas of epidemiological vectors for an unknown disease? This isn’t a cholera outbreak, buddy: turns out we can’t track down the poisoned waterpump and take the handle off.
(Serious surveys of actual mask use, involving people holding clipboards in high- traffic locations, might be of some interest if masks are worth wearing. But is anybody doing even that? The public health establishment hasn’t quite finished convincing its own rank and file that masks are good.)
A few weeks back, when Manitoba and the Dakotas became adjoining hot zones for the virus, I did my best to try understanding what had gone wrong in that part of the world. ( The Lord does have a known distaste for the cities of the plain.) South Dakota had the mother of all superspreader events when the annual Sturgis motorcycle rally went ahead with nearly half a million attendees, and that is obviously part of the problem.
But to some degree it did seem like a Western, as in western-halfof- the- continent, issue. Much of the population of the Dakotas is rural, but even the cities are roomy, quiet and folksy. People resisted adopting masks or staying clear of Fred’s Diner, thinking that these measures were for crowded, godless metropolitan warrens. At the same time, the states were encountering enormous numbers of pandemic tourists fleeing crowded America for a glimpse of wilderness, a bit of flatland peace and quiet. It wasn’t just Sturgis, although letting Sturgis go ahead was spectacularly insane.
Western independence, stubbornness and suspicion of authority are all real phenomena, and perhaps we are paying the price for them now. What I really notice, however, is that winter simply set in early out here this year. It was pretty firmly established by Halloween, and our daytime highs were firmly below zero while the Golden Horseshoe was still pushing 20 C.
The initial series of lockdowns appears to have worked more or less everywhere in Canada while the weather was improving; it is hard to be sure what, if anything, might work as the weather gets worse. We are collectively already taking precautions that seem to have eliminated community spread of regular influenza — but since COVID-19 continues to grow in destructiveness, that’s good news with horrible, nihilistic implications. If you are tempted to look at the case statistics and sneer at Alberta, and even Albertans enjoy this sport from time to time, you might want to make sure you’re not heckling the stupid canary who couldn’t handle a little firedamp.
I didn’t envision the second wave clearly.