Feeling overlooked and on their own
People with compromised immunity can't just `live with COVID'
Tim Clarke and his wife walked alone in an art gallery after two long years. They admired floors filled with Picassos, an exhibition on canoes and something Clarke called a “mirror maze,” which he confesses he almost walked into.
“I hadn't realized how much I missed it,” Clarke said.
It's one of the only outings Clarke, who has cancer, has allowed himself since the COVID -19 pandemic came to Saskatchewan in March 2020. The Remai Modern gallery in Saskatoon lets immunocompromised people like him book the gallery for an hour or two on Tuesdays. He and his wife had the place to themselves.
“It sheds lights on how you've been stuck,” Clarke said, pausing to search for another word. “How you've been restricted, constrained, imprisoned up until that time. It felt nice.”
Clarke is one of tens of thousands of people in Saskatchewan whose immune systems are weakened. For some, a bout with the virus is more likely to be debilitating or deadly, making every interaction a calculation. For them, the government's mantra of “living with COVID -19” rings hollow.
“I think the onus is solely on ourselves to protect ourselves, at this point,” said Cheryl Olson, a twotime heart transplant recipient.
Olson and Clarke say living in the pandemic has meant giving up hobbies, missing outings and limiting themselves to a tight bubble of friends and family. That didn't change after February, when Saskatchewan became the first province in Canada to drop all remaining COVID -19 health measures.
Premier Scott Moe said the virus's changing virulence and the availability of vaccines meant the province could “live with” COVID-19 without broad government interference, which he said encroached unacceptably on civil liberties. He thanked protesters who gathered at the legislature to decry government rules requiring proof of vaccination and masking. Soon those rules were gone, as was daily data reporting and a requirement that people with the virus not go out in public.
Olson did not celebrate those changes.
“It kind of felt like our safety net was taken away,” he said.
“The hard part during that, for me, was the outcry from the general public — the `normal' people who don't have any kind of pre-existing condition or who aren't immunocompromised. Man, it got pretty vile, at times. That's hard to see.”
Immunocompromised people are not a homogeneous group.
Dr. Cordell Neudorf, a University of Saskatchewan epidemiologist and acting senior medical health officer for the Saskatchewan Health Authority, said the term encompasses about three per cent of the province's population, ranging from organ transplant recipients to people with chronic diseases to those taking certain medications, all with different levels of risk.
What they have in common is that they're more likely to get sick from COVID-19 and don't benefit as much from the vaccines that protect most people from the worst outcomes. “There are some with really serious immunodeficiencies where you wind up with a chronic infection. They just can't clear it. These people can have COVID for months,” Neudorf said.
Saskatchewan's public health measures are over, but the virus may be more widespread than ever. As of last week, nearly 400 people with the virus were in hospital. Wastewater testing has found record rates of it circulating in the sewers of Saskatoon.
Olson caught COVID-19 in April. So did Scott Robertson, a Saskatoon double lung transplant recipient who said the virus reminded him of having COPD all over again.
“I called Moe every name under the sun,” Robertson said of the decision to end masking orders. He and others said don't begrudge people wanting to live their lives — they understand the desire more than most. “I want to get back to normal. I've got a granddaughter that was born two and half years ago in Ontario th a ti haven' t seen ,” robertson said. What frustrates him is that the decision appeared to appeal to people protesting mandates because they were inconvenient, whereas for him COVID-19 is life-threatening.
“They didn't take into consideration the fact that there's people like myself,” Robertson said.
Health Minister Paul Merriman denies his government ever minimized the threat of COVID-19.
“It is in our communities. We've never tried to downplay that,” he said, adding that people are welcome to wear masks if they want and urging people not to “mask-shame” others. “Immunoc om promised people have had easy access, in my opinion, to vaccination, which is the best tool they have to protect themselves,” Merriman said.
Archie Larocque, who has an autoimmune disorder, gives the government credit for securing vaccines and medications to fight COVID-19, but said he doesn't think it's done a good job of communicating the threat it poses to people in his position.
“Our needs are not significant enough for the government to pay attention to. I guess it's not all government's responsibility. But I'm not impressed with the government saying it's all an individual responsibility,” Larocque said.
Clarke, who visits a hospital regularly for cancer treatments, said he sees how the medical system is still struggling.
“It's not that I don't want people to not be able to live their lives. That would be terrible. But from my perspective, the part that rankles me is that there's been a mass abdication of responsibility of managing risk for the sake of the greater good.”