Road to finish line feels extra-lonely right now

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/04/2021 (1297 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For much of the pandemic, we’ve heard the same reminder over and over again: this is a marathon, not a sprint.

Doomscrolling through Twitter on Sunday night — apparently, I like to pour gasoline on those Sunday Scaries — I was struck by the dissonance of this particular moment in the pandemic. Unlike the “we’re all in this together” platitudes that defined the early days of this health crisis, we’re all now at very different mile markers on this particular marathon.

Out of Winnipeg, on the eve of tightened restrictions, photos from an anti-mask rally that ended up shutting down the local businesses at The Forks. Then a headline about Europe accepting fully vaccinated U.S. tourists this summer. A pre-scheduled (and since-deleted) tweet from the province about how Manitoba’s numbers are dropping. (They are not dropping.) “Are we entering a second Roaring ’20s?” Vogue magazine asked. “It may be time to dress the part soon.” A photo of a padlocked basketball net in Ontario.

A barrage of tweets about the Oscars (the Oscars!) oscillated between “thank goodness for a slice of normalcy” to “this is absolutely not the time.”

Tweets about maskless actors were followed almost immediately by tweets imploring people to pay attention to the unmitigated COVID-19 crisis in India, where people are suffocating amid oxygen shortages and world-record-setting case numbers. Photos of a mass cremation, a burning dystopia.

I scrolled back to Canada, where there was an absolutely gutting story from Brampton, Ont.: 13-year-old Emily Victoria Viegas, found unresponsive by her brother and father in her bed. “I put my head to her chest and I couldn’t feel nothing. No heartbeat. No nothing. No breathing,” her father told the Globe and Mail. Emily now has the grim distinction of being one of the youngest Canadians to die from COVID-19.

A mounting death toll, a third wave, a frustrating vaccine rollout, more restrictions, less clarity — it’s terrifying and exhausting. It’s hard not to feel as though someone has pulled us aside, kilometres away from an ever-moving finish line, and said, “OK, you’re doing great, now drop and give me 10,000 pushups.” In the last few weeks, it seems that pandemic fatigue has given way to anger — a rage that has many targets: politicians, policy-makers, each other.

Here in Manitoba, we are, most likely, going to hear a lot about how we must remain vigilant over the next few weeks, a coda to the “last-chance” language of last week. And that’s true; if we’re ever going to cross that finish line, we have to keep going.

It’s a big ask for a frustrated, angry population largely running on fumes, and rah-rah “you’ve got this!” positivity isn’t going to be what fills the tank. But perhaps perspective and empathy will be.

We can remember the people that make up the numbers on COVID-19 dashboards are actual people — people such as Emily, who will never get more time. We can use our voices to advocate for potentially life-saving measures such as paid sick leave. We can look at the cracks being exposed in the pandemic and start thinking about solutions. We can wear masks and get vaccinated and stay home. We can remember why we’re doing these things: each other.

Nothing about this is fair; some people are ahead, some people are, shamefully, being left behind. That’s why we need to have each other’s backs. Maybe it’s not a marathon, but a relay.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti