COVID skies are darkening, but there’s light on horizon

Brace yourselves. It’s not a matter of if, but when, for a return to much stricter restrictions to contain the COVID-19 pandemic.

Look, I’m as hopeful as the next person that our relatively successful Atlantic bubble will make reimplementing a lockdown unnecessary.

But I’m also a realist. This fall, beyond our borders, the rest of the country is being swamped with record numbers of new coronavirus cases.

It’s getting ugly out there. On Thursday, for the third time in a week, Canada set a new high for new cases — 4,971.

New case records are also being shattered in B.C., Ontario and Quebec, all of which have been re-imposing tougher restrictions in some regions. Quebec is considering shutting down schools again.

And as bad as the situation is in this country, we all know the global epicentre of the pandemic lies just across our southern border.

In the U.S., cases have topped 10.5 million and deaths almost 250,000, the highest such totals in the world. New cases have soared this fall — the country set a new one-day record Thursday, with 153,000 new cases — prompting warnings the American health-care system is in jeopardy of collapse in some places, say medical experts.

If that sounds grim, some caution it’s going to get even worse for our neighbour in coming months.

“What America has to understand is that we are about to enter COVID hell,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy, told CNBC.

Needless to say, the outlook in the States has not been helped by widespread, determined resistance to common-sense preventative measures like mask-wearing, social distancing and keeping gatherings small.

Meanwhile, here in Bubbleland, there’s been a small uptick in COVID-19 cases, but nothing like what’s happened elsewhere. We’d like to keep it that way.

Last week, N.S. Premier Stephen McNeil tightened restrictions around rules on selfisolating and advised against out-of-region travel. And Nova Scotia's state of emergency was put back in effect, for two weeks, as of noon Sunday.

If case numbers keep climbing higher, I expect the province will clamp down even further.

If that fills you with dread — and a case of déjà vu — there’s reason not to despair. The situation now is very different from the one in which we found ourselves last March.

When the pandemic forced the country into lockdown last spring, no one knew how long the crisis might last. No one knew how long it would be before — or even if — a vaccine or effective treatments would be found. Researchers were scrambling simply to understand the virus and what measures might work best to keep it contained.

Eight months later, much has changed.

Not one but 10 COVID-19 vaccine candidates are now in Phase 3 (final) trials. More than 100 more are in earlier stages of development. Recent exciting early results from Pfizer-BioNTech indicated their potential vaccine was up to 90 per cent effective and, importantly, without safety concerns.

Health experts seem confident that limited supplies of a vaccine will be available — for prioritized key groups — by end of year. Wider distribution could roll out through 2021 for everyone else.

We’ve also got a much better understanding of what works to limit transmission, although it has been a challenge to get some people to follow public health rules.

In other words, if we do have to go back into lockdown this winter, at least we’ll know this nightmare’s end has an identifiable timeline.

We all want this — meaning the new normal we’d adapted to these last eight months — to be over. That day is coming.