137 days of lockdown in 151 photographs
Since the province declared a state of emergency due to the coronavirus in March, the Star has published a photo and caption every day, sometimes more than one, which aimed to capture this frightening and strange moment. They are pictures of beauty and desolation; humour and tragedy; kindness and grace. They show a city that fell eerily silent and then slowly returned to life. The images by our talented photojournalists have been accompanied by thoughtful captions from politics editor Jordan Himelfarb, whose work was until now unsigned. As the series reaches a conclusion, we share how it came together. You can view all the pictures in an interactive calendar at thestar.com/torontolockdowninphotos
In the beginning there was so much helplessness. A pandemic is by definition something that can be as big as the world; it was too much to comprehend, much less address. It reduced some people to the basics: What can I do to protect myself?
And for some, it pushed them to ask, what can I do to help? Before Hayley Wickenheiser, before Ryan Reynolds, before the prime minister, that’s what Conquer COVID-19 was.
“I think everyone had a moment where they were in the fetal position, wondering what was going on,” says Laurie Dillon Schalk, an advertising executive and one of the founding members of the grassroots group. “You’re digging into your mental hierarchy of needs, right? Security, finances, food. Those are very raw emotions.”
“We were a bunch of nobodies from nowhere,” says Sulemaan Ahmed, a consultant who works with executives, and the driver of the organization. “And my wife said, why don’t we become the Tinder for PPE?”
“You need to do it quick, and you don’t know anybody, so you need to trust that the people you’re putting in place are the right people,” says Nadia Malik, a Bombardier executive who ran the corporate and partnerships wing. “It’s faith.”
It was faith.
Maybe you remember Conquer COVID-19, or maybe it’s hazy now. Early in the pandemic, the justified panic was personal protective equipment (PPE) for health-care workers. So many places needed masks, gowns, gloves, more, everything.
Ahmed was the leader of the six friends, which included his wife, Khadija Cajee, who is his partner at their consulting company, Servo Annex; Dr. Ruby Alvi, a Mississauga family physician; Gregg Tilston, a marketing manager in e-commerce; Owais Faisal Qureshi, a pension manager, and Dillon Schalk. Five years earlier, Ahmed’s son, Syed, showed up on a no-fly list at 18 months; The No Fly List Kids campaign was born, to get kids who didn’t belong off the lists. The friends had worked together on that.
So what could they do? Ventilators? No. PPE? Maybe. They worked professional connections, and recruited friends. Malik was a Bombardier executive who was friends with Alvi: she came on board, and Bombardier was supplied by 3M, and some sought-after N95 masks were obtained and distributed early. YYZ Storage offered space. Volvo offered 18 cars, and $500 gas cards. Ahmed negotiated 400 baby monitors from Toys ‘R’ Us because doctors told them it would allow for infection control while communicating with patients.
They got organized. They established lines of control. Meanwhile, Wickenheiser, the Hall of Fame hockey player turned medical resident, was working at Toronto General until the residents got pulled out. She was hearing from friends who were still working that they were days away from running out of PPE. She felt, in her words, useless.
“And I sent out a tweet hoping to try to help a couple hospitals, people that I knew,” says Wickenheiser, from Calgary. “And 10 minutes later I got a text from Ryan Reynolds and he said, can I help you amplify this? And he sent it out to 50 million people.
“That’s the hinge point. Ryan blew it up, and the next day I got a message from the Conquer COVID guys.”
She and Reynolds knew one another from the 2014 Canada Walk of Fame ceremony, where both were inducted. She had a great feeling about Ahmed and the team, which included another medical student — Yusef Ahmed, who is Alvi’s son, and who had previously been on the No Fly List with his brother Aadam. Wickenheiser trusts med students.
Oh, and her tweet was seen by Tobi Lutke and Fiona McKean of Shopify, and a week later they donated a million dollars. Things were moving.
It didn’t look as hard as it was. The first PPE drive, almost nobody came. The second one, people came.
“It was so busy, so many items, and it just felt amazing,” says Aadam, who ran the social accounts and did a pile of work behind the scenes. “And the premier came, corporate people came; that day was probably my favourite thing in all of this. Once we got there, and people started showing up, it just grew and grew, and it snowballed and people were so happy and enthusiastic. We’d have donors drive in, and they’d honk their horns, and we’d come get PPE from their trunks. I kind of wish I could go back and we could do it all again. That was really rewarding.”
Nothing was too small: At one drive, a woman came with two surgical masks in a Ziploc bag and she was almost ashamed of it. Dr. Alvi called people around and said, these could keep a family doctor going for two days. This matters.
It all mattered, but they needed to get bigger because the demand was great and drives weren’t enough. Sulemaan Ahmed’s 16-year-old daughter, Yasmeen, designed the T-shirts and Reynolds was one of the people who wore them and called them boring in his most charming way. They sold 21,000 of them — and raised $300,000 that went to PPE.
The prime minister mentioned them, as did Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer. The group expanded purchasing. Ahmed pushed to be sure everything was audited. A medical committee was formed to assess need. Inventory control was created: PPE needed to be locked up for three days, because of questions about surface transmission of the virus. Driver schedules were created. There were Zoom calls at all hours. The Northpine Foundation quietly donated half a million dollars.
People put egos aside, and solved problems. More people signed up. It peaked at 120 volunteers, and the diversity of the leadership group allowed for different perspectives. Every single person who spoke about this talked about that.
“Khadija constantly fought for women’s shelters, youth shelters, looking for areas we might have missed, talking about the needs of different communities, reminding us not to just be white saviours,” says Dillon Schalk. “That was so valuable.”
There were so many deliveries. Dillon Schalk delivered to the Pinecrest long-term-care home in Bobcaygeon, where the first of so many LTC disasters unfolded, and 29 people died; the staff were so beleaguered, so grateful. When the delivery arrived, there were plastic containers in the home filled with the belongings of residents who had died.
“When (the Pinecrest employee) told me what he needed, and they were struggling with how quickly the deaths happened, I had to disengage for a few days,” said Dillon Schalk. “When infection feels unstoppable, sometimes that can be very traumatic.”
Wickenheiser went to Participation House, the day before former health minister Dr. Jane Philpott showed up to help what was left of the staff; Wickenheiser couldn’t believe the home for people with disabilities was across the street from the Markham-Stouffville Hospital.
“I couldn’t understand how the hell we didn’t have PPE for them, when they had it in the hospital,” says Wickenheiser. “There were six staff, and everyone else had walked out in a staff of 50, and (the remaining employees) were so happy and overwhelmed, and as we walked out a male nurse made a heart with his fingers. You could really feel the desperation there.”
People met with nurses in parking lots: here are 10 boxes of N95s, good luck. Volunteers drove all over; Blue Jays broadcaster Jamie Campbell drove 700 kilometres for a delivery in Timmins. They gave people what they said they needed, just enough. Sulemaan Ahmed did a delivery one evening to
Etobicoke General, with his father. “The nurses started crying,” said Sulemaan. “And one nurse said, you doubled our supply. This is more valuable than gold right now.”
The thing is, it stayed work. After the cool stuff — and Reynolds FaceTimed with Wickenheiser every week for updates, between his quiet surprise FaceTimes to Canadian health-care workers across Canada to lift spirits — the work continued.
And this week Conquer COVID-19 is wrapping up, and the final numbers are a testament to what some Canadians did when they decided they weren’t helpless, when they put their hearts into it. The organization raised $2.383 million, all accounted for, and spent it on approximately 600,000 pieces of PPE that reached over 200 hospitals, long-term-care homes, shelters, First Nations reserves, migrant worker-dependent farms and more, over six provinces. According to CFO Andrew Branion, who made sure the money was straight, they had some $123,000 in overages on purchases returned to them; it will be spent, too.
“Too bad it was needed, for sure,” says Branion, a retired executive vice-president at Scotiabank.
All these volunteers who sometimes worked 22 hours a day, who worked on this in addition to their jobs, who gave of themselves — they can go back to their lives, especially now that the PPE supply chains are steadier, and the depleted PPE stockpiles are, day by day, being refilled.
It could be needed again, of course. Dillon Schalk has almost finished an open-source playbook for anybody else who wants to replicate what Conquer COVID did, detailing organization, intake forms, everything. In Calgary, Wickenheiser is back in a hospital, still learning, working in ER.
“I saw 23 ICU admissions today, and yeah, we’re getting a little second wave,” Wickenheiser says, with a grim laugh.
And in a neat bit of symmetry, Aadam was part of a meeting with Public Safety Canada last week on the No Fly List Kids project; a redress process for misidentified people is almost in place. Good people can make good things happen. Maybe one day, everyone involved will actually meet.
“Seeing each other face to face, will be a big thing,” says Malik. “I think it’ll be emotional. Hopefully, we’ll be able to give each other a hug.”
They really were like the rest of us, and still are. But they did something extraordinary for other Canadians, without being asked, without asking for anything. There will be a lot forgotten about this pandemic.
Let’s remember this.