June 2020
The crowds that packed Trinity-Bellwoods Park on May 24 may have been committing a careless act (future infections from the participants will tell), but in way I can hardly blame them.
Firstly, we have been receiving so mixed messages, outright flip-flops and blatant disregard of “the rules” by our political leaders, that it’s quite possible that people just don’t know what to believe anymore.
First Canada’s Chief Public Health Dr. Theresa Tam told us that masks were not necessary. Now the party line is that they are necessary. Now we are told that we should be wearing masks when out in public and can’t social-distance (a term that I hope I never hear again after this pandemic is over)?
Back in January, we were told that closing the borders wouldn’t stop the virus as viruses know no borders, and those who insisted on border closures, especially from hot-spots, were called racist; that is until Trudeau closed our border and is now insistent that it should not re-open until at least mid-June.
We’re told to isolate in our homes and not go to our cottages; then our PM and Premier do exactly that.
Back in January, federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu chastised a reporter as “…feeding into the conspiracy theories…” when asked about Associated Press articles citing Chinese government documents indicating that Beijing knew about the pandemic on 14 January, but withheld the information from the World Health Organization (WHO) until 20 January. Then it turned out, that was exactly what Beijing had done.
We were told that we had to shut down our economy and isolate ourselves in our homes to prevent our hospitals from being overwhelmed. Now, I’m not saying in any way that we shouldn’t have made drastic restrictions to our daily lives, but now that we have seen that our hospitals we not overwhelmed and the restrictions seem to have worked, we can’t continue to watch our economy to crater; watch people lose their businesses and the money they invested in them.
One thing that I would like to know is how many of these young people in the park live in 500 sq ft apartments with no balcony; how many are temporarily laid off; how many have seen their employer permanently shut down; how many are business owners who have lost everything?
Bottom line, people are getting frustrated and disillusioned. We were told in the beginning to self-isolate in our homes for a few weeks to flatten the curve and thus not overload our hospitals, which has happened. The numbers of those infected is much lower than even the most conservative of estimates by our health care experts, which don’t get me wrong, is a good thing, but we’re now 2 months into this lockdown and people are getting tired of isolating from their social circles and activities.
The colder than usual spring has helped with the self-isolation, but with the coming warmer weather, we will see more and more people disregarding the rules that we’ve all been living under since the middle of March.
