COVID in Saskatchewan only seems like it's over
It's an odd world of contrasts.
Wednesday evening, after just a few days of cold damp and rain, I was struck by how normal — and how beautiful — Saskatoon seemed.
Outside, it was like COVID was long gone, almost like it had never been. Runners near the Meewasin Park on the bike path, dog walkers, the sun cutting down orange from the horizon as the early evenings of fall begin in earnest — it was sublime. Life seemed normal.
I noticed it, I think, because of an odd juxtaposition — the precautions at the polling stations for the Saskatoon Meewasin provincial byelection.
At the polling station at the Rusty Macdonald branch library, all the poll workers were wearing masks, Plexiglas barriers and distancing rules were in place. Small single-use pencils were provided for voting, and then discarded.
Voters were told they could wear masks, though it wasn't required. A fair number did; many did not.
It was my first experience in a long time of the dichotomy of COVID precautions versus the free-for-all we now seem to expect.
Mask-wearers in public spaces are now the minority: wearing one, as I try to do in public places, feels odd and makes me feel like I stand out — something I've spent a lifetime trying to avoid.
It feels almost like we've cumulatively decided that we can just wish away the pandemic by ignoring it, by getting on with our lives regardless.
But it isn't over, not by a long shot.
Around the world, 6.5 million people have been confirmed as having died of COVID, and those numbers are considerably understated.
In the United States, where more than one million people have died of COVID, the overall national life expectancy has fallen by three years since the pandemic started.
That's a stunning drop, one not seen since the years accounting for the deaths of young American men in the Second World War.
But President Joe Biden was willing to tell the media this week that the pandemic was over.
And governments — Canadian governments among them — have effectively vanished COVID numbers from public view, urging us to take public responsibility for our own health and safety without giving us the information we need to do that.
The health details that we do have show that more people have died in this province from COVID so far in 2022 than died in the same period in 2021 — 552 deaths from Jan. 1 to Sept. 10, 2022, compared to 464 in the January to September period in 2021.
(Part of that may be the awkward balance between a less-deadly but more contagious Omicron variant of the virus, and a significantly higher number of under-thepublic-health-radar cases. Testing, especially rapid testing, simply isn't seeing positive tests recorded in any useful and public way.)
But COVID deaths are only part of the picture.
There's a knock-on effect that means that there are other deaths connected to COVID, if not directly caused by the virus. Hospitals are overburdened, meaning that health care may not be delivered quickly and effectively for other health issues.
That can result in deaths, and increased health-care costs as illnesses that may have been caught early aren't and require more significant costs to address.
And then there are the longer term costs: Long-term COVID will add burdens to already-stressed health-care systems for a considerable period of time.
It also can destroy quality of life for those suffering from the virus' oft-lengthy after-effects.
We're hearing about the very real problem of exhausted health workers who are overstressed, and who feel underappreciated for the work they do, leaving the health-care system.
The problem is that the burdens loaded on the health-care system by COVID don't end because someone in government makes a pronouncement.
Obviously, we're all tired of the pandemic, and wish it was over.
But wishing it away is not going to work.
And the structural problems and costs the pandemic will continue to create in health care — especially if we now try to pretend the virus doesn't exist any more and let it run free — will last for decades.