reopening

Friday May 22, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday May 22, 2020

We can’t give in to ‘quarantine fatigue’

If you’re driving in the dark down a rough, mountain road, you’d be wise to ease your foot off the accelerator.

May 6, 2020

Your limited vision, not knowing what’s around the corner and the risk of making a fatal wrong turn will be enough to convince you the best way forward is to go slow.

And that should be the motto for every Canadian as the country begins to emerge from the prison of its two-month, COVID-19 lockdown.

Go slow.

It won’t be easy. This is the third day since Ontario allowed stores, parks, campgrounds, golf courses, marinas and construction sites to reopen. Prince Edward Island is preparing to welcome its returning summer residents. In many parts of Quebec, children are back learning in their elementary schools while limited outdoor gatherings are legal again.

April 30, 2020

We can already taste some of the freedoms we took for granted, but have been denied since mid-March. And we yearn for more.

We’re tired of staying alone in our homes and apart when we’re out. We can’t wait to return to our favourite coffee shop or hug an old friend. As for those of us rendered jobless by COVID-19, the day we can get back to work and start paying our bills again can’t come soon enough.

Besides all this, the heartening progress that’s been made — including the flattening of the curve in new COVID-19 cases — will make a lot of us think we’ve got this battle won. That conclusion is grossly premature.

April 25, 2020

According to Dr. Theresa Tam, the nation’s chief public health officer, we’re experiencing “quarantine fatigue.” But we have to resist it, limit our expectations and keep taking all the safety precautions that once seemed extraordinary but are now simply ordinary.

April 14, 2020

“This is quite a difficult period … one of the most difficult periods of time where people have been observing this public health advice,” Dr. Tam said Thursday. “And now, some things are easing up, and there is this exuberance of maybe getting out there. (It) means that people may forget to do all the core public health measures.”

Canadians can’t let this happen. We have to realize it’s not an accident that this country is managing to wrestle the pandemic to the mat. This positive turn of events has been made possible only because of the patience and self-sacrifice demonstrated by the vast majority of Canadians. 

Thanks to their efforts, Canada has avoided the devastation wreaked by COVID-19 in countries such as the United States, where 95,000 people have died from it, or the United Kingdom and Italy. COVID-19 has killed more than 35,000 in both places.

Of course, it’s been horrible in Canada. The death toll hit 6,145 Thursday and there are still hundreds of people suffering from COVID-19 in hospital intensive care units. But we have averted the worst-cases scenarios in which federal government scientists warned 350,000 Canadians could perish from COVID-19.

So now we have to walk toward the new normal before we run for it. Lack of discipline could result in a devastating second wave of COVID-19 that would force another lockdown and make two months of unprecedented effort seem wasted.

We need to keep abreast with what’s been reopened and what’s still off limits. If we’re not already wearing a face-mask when we can’t physical distance, we should start. We need to keep washing our hands until they’re red, and veering off sidewalks to stay two metres from another pedestrian.

And we shouldn’t need a flashing, yellow light to persuade us to go slow. (Hamilton Spectator) 

 

Wednesday May 6, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday May 6, 2020

Science vs Politics; Lives vs Livelihoods

This accursed pandemic has brought us a range of new expressions. Flattening the curve. Social distancing — or physical distancing if you prefer. Self isolation. Stay home, stay safe. 

And then there’s this one. Lives over livelihoods. 

Coronavirus cartoons

Where, exactly, this originated in the COVID-19 context, we do not know. But it’s one of the better descriptors and we can expect to hear a lot more of it now that most jurisdictions are beginning to talk and act on reopening society and the economy. It works either way, too. Livelihoods over lives.

That’s the philosophy driving decision-making in jurisdictions where reopening the economy and relaxing pandemic societal rules are judged more important than minimizing the human toll of the virus. This would include the many states in the U.S. where governments are rushing to normalize life and working. In many of these states, they haven’t yet begun the flatten the curve. They still report many new cases and new deaths every day. 

And yet the governors in those states, with full and urgent support from the Trump administration, are moving faster and faster to throw their economies wide open. Hair salons, tattoo parlours, beaches, restaurants — you name it.

Health and medical voices in America are warning of dire consequences. The most respected disease projections in that country now predict that previous death estimates will double, largely become of reduced distancing, more openness and increased mobility. By the end of May, the models say, daily reported cases will double. Up until recently, these models were regularly cited by the Trump White House as being gold standard. Now they are inaccurate, the president has decided. 

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie is a loathesome character by any reasonable definition. But at least he is honest about America’s frenzied reopening. He says yes, more people will die, but that’s the price of renewed economic prosperity, and Americans just need to get used to it. Livelihoods over lives rules the day in Donald Trump’s America.

Thankfully, not so here in Canada and Ontario. Our political leaders still adhere to the lives over livelihoods mantra. But it’s getting increasingly difficult, as you can see by the growing agitation among people of a certain political stripe to get back to business. Not every Canadian who needs the emergency benefit (CERB) has received it yet, but already Andrew Scheer wants to talk about cutting it back so as not to be a “disincentive” to get people back to work. 

You can certainly see the stress on Ontario Premier Doug Ford. This week, he is once again holding out optimism for some normalcy over the Victoria Day weekend. Just a week or so ago he did the same thing and then had to walk back his optimism because it wasn’t supported by health data.

Anyone with empathy has to feel for Ford. He’s a business-first politician in an environment that won’t allow him to be business-first. He desperately wants to hold out a light at the end of the tunnel, but he has to be careful. If he overpromises again, his credibility takes a hit. If he presides over a government that moves too quickly, he knows he will wear the increased fatality counts, just like Quebec Premier Francois Legault will if his overly-aggressive approach to reopening backfires (he has already had to delay his reopening by two weeks).

But Ford, like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is unwavering. He will not put the economy first at the expense of more dead people. Trudeau and Ford will not put livelihoods ahead of lives. Even though not doing so will cost more money and inflict more economic devastation. We don’t know about you, but we’re happy to be governed by people with their priorities in the right order. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial)

 

Tuesday May 5, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday May 5, 2020

The President Is Unraveling

The country is witnessing the steady, uninterrupted intellectual and psychological decomposition of Donald Trump.

December 20, 2016

In case there was any doubt, the past dozen days have proved we’re at the point in his presidency where Donald Trump has become his own caricature, a figure impossible to parody, a man whose words and actions are indistinguishable from an Alec Baldwin skit on Saturday Night Live.

President Trump’s pièce de résistance came during a late April coronavirus task-force briefing, when he floated using “just very powerful light” inside the body as a potential treatment for COVID-19 and then, for good measure, contemplated injecting disinfectant as a way to combat the effects of the virus “because you see it gets in the lungs and does a tremendous number on them, so it’d be interesting to check that.”

But the burlesque show just keeps rolling on.

December 16, 2000

Take this past weekend, when former President George W. Bush delivered a three-minute video as part of The Call to Unite, a 24-hour live-stream benefiting COVID-19 relief.

Bush joined other past presidents, spiritual and community leaders, front-line workers, artists, musicians, psychologists, and Academy Award winning actors. They offered advice, stories, and meditations, poetry, prayers, and performances. The purpose of The Call to Unite (which I played a very minor role in helping organize) was to offer practical ways to support others, to provide hope, encouragement, empathy, and unity.

In his video, which went viral, Bush—in whose White House I worked—never mentioned Trump. Instead, he expressed gratitude to health-care workers, encouraged Americans to abide by social-distancing rules, and reminded his fellow Americans that we have faced trying times before.

April 7, 2001

“I have no doubt, none at all, that this spirit of service and sacrifice is alive and well in America,” Bush said. He emphasized that “empathy and simple kindness are essential, powerful tools of national recovery.” And America’s 43rd president asked us to “remember how small our differences are in the face of this shared threat.”

“In the final analysis,” he said, “we are not partisan combatants; we are human beings, equally vulnerable and equally wonderful in the sight of God.” Bush concluded, “We rise or fall together, and we are determined to rise.”

That was too much for Trump, who attacked his Republican predecessor on (where else?) Twitter: “[Bush] was nowhere to be found in speaking up against the greatest Hoax in American history!”

March 26, 2019

So think about that for a minute. George W. Bush made a moving, eloquent plea for empathy and national unity, which enraged Donald Trump enough that he felt the need to go on the attack.

But there’s more. On the same weekend that he attacked Bush for making an appeal to national unity, Trump said this about Kim Jong Un, one of the most brutal leaders in the world: “I, for one, am glad to see he is back, and well!”

Then, Sunday night, sitting at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial for a town-hall interview with Fox News, Trump complained that he is “treated worse” than President Abraham Lincoln. “I am greeted with a hostile press, the likes of which no president has ever seen,” Trump said.

By Monday morning, the president was peddling a cruel and bizarre conspiracy theoryaimed at MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, a Trump critic, with Trump suggesting in his tweet that a “cold case” be opened to look into the death of an intern in 2001. (Continued: The Atlantic)



 

Saturday April 25, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday April 25, 2020

Georgia Hairdessers Weigh the Order to Reopen During a Pandemic

On Monday, within hours of Governor Brian Kemp’s announcement that many Georgia businesses could reopen on Friday, Maureen, a sixty-nine-year-old retired schoolteacher, texted her hairdresser, who owns a salon in Atlanta, about an hour from Maureen’s home, in Athens. “The Gov says you can open! 🙂 My appointment is on Friday of this week. What’s your plan?” Maureen, who voted for Kemp, made the appointment eight weeks earlier, before the coronavirus pandemichad shut down much of the country, and she was hoping to keep it. Her hairdresser, a man in his early sixties who asked that I not use his name, did not vote for Kemp. He told her that he would not be reopening until the following Monday—and only in a limited way. Maureen could try one of his other hairdressers, he said, but he wouldn’t be seeing clients himself until May 12th at the earliest. And, the hairdresser told me a few days later, if “Kemp’s science project goes as expected”—by which he meant badly—“then I have no idea when.”

July 23, 2009

Nearly a thousand people in Georgia have died, so far, of complications from the coronavirus, according to the numbers that have been reported. (The actual number may be higher.) Like the Central Georgia health board and many others in the state and around the country, the hairdresser did not think it was time to shift pandemic protocols in order to reopen businesses, even with precautions like masks, gloves, and disinfectant. “I thought it was the most asinine decision any governor could have ever made,” he said, “given the science we’re presented with, what Fauci and the other guys are saying.” The hairdresser checks the daily case counts regularly, he said. “Atlanta has been spiking up and down,” he noted. “I think yesterday we had maybe twelve hundred new cases. Today, maybe seven hundred or so—but it’s not midnight yet, I don’t know.” There are more than twenty thousand confirmed cases in the state. He went on, “It’s pretty damn silly, insisting on a haircut right now. But, you have to understand, my clientele is very privileged. To them, this is a very big sacrifice, to go without a haircut. I’ve had people offer me money to come to their houses—what’s the difference that’s gonna make? I don’t know. It’s a very entitled world.”

September 11, 2007

The hairdresser’s employees are contractors, who rent booths from him at the salon. Shortly after the announcement, he sent them the Georgia State Board of Cosmetologists and Barbers’ guidelines on reopening, which he called “the craziest thing—social distancing while giving a haircut is hard.” The board recommends that barbers wear a face shield and gloves, as a start. “You need to be in a smock, too,” the salon owner went on, “and change your smock after every haircut, into another clean, sanitized smock. The client is in sanitized cape and smock and neck wrap. Then you have to sanitize your whole station and chair.” Taking each client’s temperature and having them answer a health questionnaire is also recommended. “If I were getting paid the salary of a surgeon,” the hairdresser said, “it might be worth all the scrubbing.”

Some of the contractors are willing to take risks to pay their bills. “We could wait,” the owner said, referring to reopening. “But I feel like these hairdressers chomping at the bit—if they’re willing to do it and really take it seriously, and I’m there to monitor it—I can’t say no to them. But,” he added, “I’m kind of a wimp.”

Coronavirus cartoons

One of these contractors, Brittany, who’s thirty-five, has been at the salon for four years. “If Home Depot can be open and people can shop because they’re bored and want to buy houseplants, and Target can be open for people to buy yoga pants,” she told me, “I don’t see the harm in me—carefully and safely—doing a client.” Brittany said that she is a Republican but did not vote for Kemp. She charges around two hundred dollars per session. “Twelve hundred doesn’t even pay half my booth rent,” she said, referring to the stimulus check she received from the federal government. (The salon owner did not charge booth rent while the store was closed.) “So you don’t want to be unsafe, but you also don’t want to lose clients or income. It’s a rock and a hard place, you know?” (The New Yorker)