Documented worldwide cases of Covid-19 have surpassed 3 million people. The US will surpass 1 million of those later today. Canada will surpass 50,000 this week. And sadly, over 200,000 people have died as a result of contracting this virus.
Canada and California are similar in population size, both are doing a good job keeping the number of people infected down, and both are still dealing with 1,000 to 1,500+ new cases a day.
The good news, hospitals here on the North American west coast are not inundated like they have been in Italy, Spain, and New York. The challenging news, we are not out of the woods yet and diligence must be maintained… especially as we move to reopen parts of the economy.
I’m no longer making predictions about what things will look like in the coming weeks and months… the virus isn’t a weather system coming in from the west and bringing rainfall. It has a life of its own. While we have considerable influence as a community, and as citizens who want to keep the spread of the virus down, we also have to respond to new outbreaks and change our habits as suggested by health authorities.
It will be a dance… Opening things up, tightening things up, closing things down, permitting small gatherings, and then recommendations against them. The numbers will dictate what makes sense. And while that’s easy to say, as we do the dance, it will feel like the songs aren’t staying on long enough for us to get used to the rhythm.
It won’t feel like things are normal for quite some time. And that’s not the new normal, that’s a level of stress and uncertainty that will loom for a while. I was trying to avoid paying attention to the numbers, but I realize now that they are something tangible that I can pay attention to. I can see patterns, and try to understand why we are getting the provincial and federal health and social distancing advice that we are getting.
The numbers aren’t complete, they don’t tell the whole story, but they tell us when things are headed in the right versus the wrong direction. Whether they grow incrementally or exponentially, they tell us a story, and we should be aware of when that story changes… and be prepared for new changes to our rules of social and work engagement when they do.
