Day 12 - 15 Cases
2020 March 29
Sunday
10:10 pm:
Today my Public Health Unit announced that the confirmed cases in our area now stands at 15. Some of those cases relate to an outbreak in a care home, and almost immediately on the local newsgroups I saw people explaining away the numbers as almost ALL being related to that outbreak.
I gently corrected a few of these posts, providing links to the relevant articles and reminders that diagnosed case numbers are like the tip of the iceberg — it’s what we can see — and the majority of the cases are walking around unseen, and possibly oblivious to their illness.
I get it.
Until now, for various reasons, our PHU has been touting zero cases — but that was mostly due to testing restrictions and because many people here who needed testing were having the testing done in Ottawa, where their cases were rolled into Ottawa’s numbers. It wasn’t because there were no cases in our community, but it has been easy for people here to assume that it’s a “city problem”. For many, life is unchanged other than the frustration of closed businesses and shortages at the grocery store.
I do understand the impulse to explain away the numbers — the desire to keep things unchanged is strong.
But things have changed, and we need to change with it. If people don’t stop popping out to the store every day and start consolidating their errands into a single day of running around each week, this will get so much worse so quickly. If people don’t realize that meeting outside for coffee and play dates doesn’t meet the definition of “physical distancing” (which is what you practice when you meet someone outside of your household while running ESSENTIAL errands), we won’t be able to keep this under control.
People deliberately choosing to ignore safety restrictions will ruin this for everyone, and we will end up in a situation where the government needs to step in, mobilize the military or other resources, and keep us in our homes. They will ruin the bit of freedom we still have right now, I will lose my walks on the trail, and it will be harder to run errands for friends and neighbors. The illusion of freedom is so important to my mental health, and I know many of my friends feel the same.
An update on John pic.twitter.com/fPQbv0tLyB
— John Prine (@JohnPrineMusic) March 29, 2020
In other news today, I’m gutted to hear that John Prine is in critical condition with this illness. He is one of the musical voices I’ve grown up with, and hearing he’s now on a ventilator made me cry.
Stay home, Folks. Please stay home.
Save up all your essential errands and run them once a week, not as they come up. If you need to hang with your friends, do it over video chat and not from your vehicles in a parking lot. Stay in your community — don’t risk moving the virus from one community to another more than it is moving already.