The heartbreak etched into a grim milestone
In ancient times, a milestone — millarium — was a marker, a pillar or pile of stones erected alongside roads radiating outward from the Roman Forum. The distance covered by a Roman Legion in 1,000 paces: Mille, a mile.
By measurement of the coronavirus, it could be marked with gravestones and crosses instead, around the world. The pandemic distance we’ve travelled.
Toronto arrived at a grim milestone on Thursday — reaching a thousand dead from COVID-19 and related illnesses, confirmed by the city’s chief medical officer.
If that awful number seems unrelatable, too amorphous, think of it this way: Two 767s crashing in midair with no survivors. More than twice the capacity of the Tragically Hip’s gig at the Horseshoe Tavern; one-third over the capacity of a splashy wedding reception or prom party at the Old Mill. Except, of course, there are no proms for the graduating class of 2020.
Each fatality encompasses a back story and a future erased. The isolated senior at a longterm-care facility denied human touch from a family member. The front-line health-care worker and low-wage support employee. The airport cab driver transporting passengers insufficiently scrutinized as they passed through a jampacked customs hall. The blithely careless, congregating in parks without observing physical distancing protocols. The homeless desperately seeking safe shelter.
Husbands and wives, in at least one case an elderly couple dying within minutes of each other in the ICU. At least they had each other, hands outstretched. Parents and grandparents. In Ontario, a 9.2 per cent mortality rate among confirmed patients, excluding those whose illness has not run its course, based on the latest data. According to a Public Health Ontario study, nearly four times as many people are estimated infected than the confirmed cases, and those 80 and older are estimated to be four times more likely to get the virus than any other age group.
“It’s a timely thing to think about,” says Dr. Isaac Bogoch, infectious disease specialist, internal medicine physician and veteran of the COVID-19 wars at University Health Network. “Every one of those deaths is an extremely sad and important event. Sometimes the human component can get lost in the mix, talking about numbers and statistics instead of acknowledging the lives they lived, the tragedy of death to them, their families, their friends. There’s really no silver lining to a pandemic.”
He remembers all the faces, the patients who passed through his hands but never emerged from hospital as “cured.”
The severely ill man who watched “Jeopardy!” on repeat, all day long. The woman who asked for classical music to be played in her room through all the hours of her illness.
“So many deaths that could have been preventable,” Bogoch observes, regretfully. “There’s been a tremendous change in a short period of time, things we’ve learned, especially around care of the elderly in long-term facilities. Conditions that existed prepandemic. All COVID-19 did was expose the vulnerabilities and poor care that many, but not all, of these facilities were providing.
“It’s tragic that it took hundreds and hundreds of deaths in Toronto, thousands of deaths across Canada in these facilities, to acknowledge this.”
History will judge us harshly, rightly, for the trauma imposed on our institutionalized elderly and their forcibly distanced families, where proper personal protection gear would have solved much of the dilemma. At the least, residents of longterm-care homes would have received the tender ministrations that loved ones could have provided, ensuring they were fed, kept clean, their hurts and anxieties addressed.
We have been barbaric, that way.
In hospitals, as Bogoch recounts, there were tremendous boosts to everybody’s spirits when poor-prognosis patients suddenly experienced a turnaround. Miraculous, really. “You’re thinking, from a clinical standpoint, it’s probable they’ll succumb to their illness. Then you come in the next morning and they’re sitting up in bed, eyes wide open, looking fantastic. There have been a few of those surprising stories. I obviously love seeing those. You want to jump for joy.”
Newspaper obituaries give only a thumbnail narrative of lives lived, ended by COVID-19, with the addendum of celebrations of lives to be held later, when safe convening is permitted. In memoriam pages on social media provide for virtual gatherings and solace.
Beverley Anne Logan: Just 60 years old when she died on April 2, leaving behind a husband and three sons. Beloved sister to my dear friend Lorraine Campbell.
“I look at the numbers and I can’t believe that my sister is one of them,” says Lorraine. “There isn’t a night that goes by that I don’t think of her. Maybe four nights a week I drive to her house and just sit outside.”
Logan was a Toronto traffic cop for 35 years, had no underlying conditions that made her vulnerable to COVID-19. On the Friday before her death, she had shortness of breath and a dry cough. Was admitted to hospital — not in intensive care, just the COVID ward — and was better enough to check out on the Tuesday. Went to bed on the Wednesday and never woke up again.
“We never had a chance to say goodbye,” says Lorraine, overcome with heartbreak again, just talking about it. “I’m so angry, but I don’t know who to be angry at.”
Two of Logan’s sons, studying out of province, were unable to come home because of travel restrictions. “It’s like we’ve never been able to grieve as a family,” Lorraine adds sadly.
Over and over, across this city, those solemn scenarios – loss and bewilderment — have played out.
Much recent public discourse has focused on when and how Toronto will reopen in a way that approximates normalcy. Stalled at Stage 1 while most of the province has progressed to Stage 2. Restaurants, stores, businesses that have struggled to keep their heads above water are keen to roll out. Collectively, the economic pounding the city has absorbed has been pegged at $1.5 billion — a 90 per cent decline in key revenues from such financial streams as the TTC, parking, local investment.
The tab could crest at $2.7 billion, should physical distancing requirements extend for the rest of 2020, according to the city’s financial impact assessment.
But how to assess what the city has lost in a social and community context; what can’t be recovered. A mental and emotional equilibrium, a sense of well-being for all our chronic shortcomings.
Drained and depleted, warned by epidemiologists of a potential second wave of COVID-19 in the flu-season fall. Perhaps, despite all the methodical precautions, moving too fast for a rapacious virus that circles and insinuates itself wherever there’s a wedge of exposure. As a cautionary tale: Israel. A fortnight after completely reopening schools, a screeching reversal was declared last week after 244 students and staff tested positive, 130 at a single school.
Toronto’s schools won’t reopen until at least September. But daycares have been given the green light. Summer day camps have been given the green light. Malls will likely soon get the green light.
We, all of the pandemic survivors, have sailed close to the edge of the COVID horizon, quickened surely to the fact of our own mortality and the gossamer thread that holds those we love close to us. Have these past three months — Toronto declaring its lockdown emergency on March 23 — imbued us with more empathy, greater kindness, or at least prudence?
“Those over the age of 60 or with underlying medical conditions certainly have it at the front of their mind and are behaving accordingly,” says Bogoch. “But younger people? I honestly can’t say. I don’t have my hand on the pulse of the city.”
The heart of Toronto, still beating. But its soul has taken a thrashing.