Familiar lines on the sidewalk, in many places, have worn away.
   We see few masks haphazardly discarded along the path, and fewer still covering the faces of people we pass by. Yet, there are still occasional reminders on signs instructing us of the necessity for physical distancing, or to wash your hands and be respectful of others.
   We are in this together, a common refrain a few years back, is still a phrase you see now and then.
   How much attention do we still pay to the message?
   It was four years ago a global pandemic settled onto this continent. A state of emergency was issued in some U.S. states, across Canada, and much of North America went into total lockdown.
   Mandatory stay-at-home orders were issued. Our homes became our workplace for many of us, except those working in what were deemed essential services (and the definition of what was ‘essential’ was both questioned and expanded).
   Isolation was required. The fears spelled out in government health warnings affected us all whether we paid attention or not. Coronavirus was the initial term used in the global warnings. By the time it was identified as COVID-19, it had become even more of a deadly threat to humankind.
   Hindsight allows us now to look back on how devastating the virus was to local and global economies. We still, four years on, cannot define how much of an impact it has been on financial markets because it reverberates to this day. The term pre-pandemic is a chronological period news reports express regularly as a point of reference we still wait for business or employment numbers to return to.
   There are continual reminders of our recent societal devastation. As we walk on by the signs or lines on the sidewalk, still unsure of where we are headed, do we truly remember what we went through?
   We don’t have to think that hard to recall how we lived in survival mode, as we masked up, washed our hands raw, and limited our personal contact to small bubbles of family and friends.
   How easily can you think back on the isolation and actual trauma of it all?
The latest official numbers show total COVID-19 cases in Canada reaching 4,936,603 as of yesterday. The count currently rises about 3,000 a week as new strains of the virus are discovered or mutate. Total deaths in this country, as of March 5th, have been pegged at 58,560 which is, in actual fact, a population larger than the city I grew up in.
   Our health-care system has been crushed — organizationally and morally — under the weight of this damned virus. Governments seem to have stopped caring (I know my province of Ontario certainly has) about COVID in the same way they stopped announcing the daily death counts we lived with all those months ago.
   We live now with a more silent fear that comes alive each time I hear the wet cough of a stranger in a shopping mall on a day when I decided not to wear a mask. I keep a supply of masks on hand, but seem to forget about them until such reminders. I, like most everybody else, still have many small bottles of hand sanitizer in the car, on the desk, or at the bottom of a purse or packsack.
   Sanitizing your hands has become as normalized as getting a booster shot for the original COVID-19 vaccination. I’ve had four or five subsequent shots; it has become such a continual process in my health care regime, that the numbers are less impactful than the necessity.
   We also don’t hear the rampant public opposition to vaccines that we used to. Perhaps because the disbelievers who once protested so loudly have since succumbed to the virus. Or did they come to their senses?
   Did we?
   As a society, are we any wiser?
   I would certainly like to think so. After all, we are still in this together.

© 2024 j.g. lewis