We’ve just been through our first pandemic Christmas as a “cross border” family who, for the first time since immigrating, hasn’t actually crossed that border for an entire year. Canada has been dealing with a second wave of COVID-19 since shortly after Thanksgiving and, as our hospitals reach capacity amidst concern over a new variant of the coronavirus, Ontario has entered into a province-wide shutdown that officially started yesterday. This measure is expected to last two weeks in rural areas, and four weeks across all our major population centres (including where we live) after which the government will look at the data and decide whether to return to our colour-coded, regional framework for reopening again.
While a vocal minority of folks are resisting these measures, for the most part Ontarians support our public health policies. Some are frustrated that we’ve not taken a more proactive and comprehensive approach, and there is widespread criticism that our provincial government has been tailoring restrictions to benefit corporations while disenfranchising small businesses. It also doesn’t help matters that, for both political and cultural reasons, there have been very few travel restrictions within Ontario (or across Canada as a whole) since the pandemic began. Fearful of treading on The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, we tend to do a lot of “recommending” and not a lot of enforcement when it comes to freedom of movement. It can be hard to know how to feel about all this, in a glass half-full or half-empty kind of way…depending on whether one is looking around the world comparatively at success stories like Australia, New Zealand, and many Asian countries, or abject failures such as the UK and the United States.
For our friends and family, disparities across the international border right next door have been a constant focus of attention. Here in Canada, CTV News has been maintaining a scoreboard of statistics which compare all the provinces and states together, a viewing option I’ve noticed none of the major American news sites provide. By most measures, the current situation in Ontario “ranks” on par with Vermont in terms of per-million case averages, placing us better off than every other state (save Hawaii) with middling results relative to other Canadian provinces.
What’s more starkly contrasted, however, are death rates, which now appear to be completely out of control in the USA. It continues to shock us how mundanely stateside media seems to address this, as if the coronavirus killing more people than heart attacks is somehow inevitable, or that these kinds of rates have become commonplace worldwide (which is absolutely not the case). This past weekend, the staggering milestone was passed that more than 1 in every 1000 people in America have now died from COVID-19. Total deaths across the USA have accelerated beyond “a 9/11” or even “a D-Day invasion” per day, and before the end of January the cumulative total may eclipse the nation’s combat casualties suffered during the entirety of World War II.
From my perspective, receiving daily news from both countries and talking with people all over the continent, it feels like Canadians and Americans are not only getting different information, but fundamentally experiencing the COVID-19 situation in completely different ways. Here, we perceive the pandemic as something horrific that has changed our lives almost completely. It is seen by most as a catastrophe of human failure, one for which we primarily blame our own leaders, that we are gradually getting under control through shared sacrifice as we try to keep each other safe. Our social safety net, while strained, is still trying to protect as many people as possible. Down south, the pandemic tends to be characterized as more of an anger-inducing inconvenience, a force majeure that crossed the sea like some kind of eccentric import, any fault laying largely with foreign governments or questionably trustworthy “international organizations.” While it has shattered most American families’ financial supports, for many it has only marginally transformed their expectations of day-to-day living. The collective mythmaking seems to be that there is little to be done until vaccines arrive (and enough people can be convinced to get them) so folks should just hope for the best, stretch their credit cards, and only wear a mask or modify their lifestyle as they see fit. Some state legislatures have even gone so far as to make it explicitly illegal for municipalities to enact face covering requirements.
If I designed a flag to represent 2020, it’d be the “facepalm” emoji next to the one for “shrug.” 🤦♂️ 🤷♂️
That would only be telling half the tale however, because while I’m feeling as cynical and frustrated as anyone I know, I am simultaneously filled with humility and no small amount of awe every time I stop to think about the core reason most of us, anywhere, have some hope right now.
It continues to blow my mind that less than one year after a totally novel pathogen suddenly threatened humanity, we are already starting to roll out multiple effective vaccines. The stories behind how that’s happened are at least as significant, in my opinion, as the pandemic itself. These scientific achievements (perhaps moreso than the dreadful events that required them) could become a defining characteristic of this young century, and you know my favourite part? These are stories about geeks, these are stories that transcend gender and race, and these are stories are about international cooperation and immigrants saving the day. Can you imagine anything more antithetical to the suffocating zeitgeist of the era of Trump and Brexit? How about a throwing in some references to Star Trek…after all Project Lightspeed and Operation Warp Speed may just be two of the coolest things, with admittedly silly names, that humanity has ever done. I really don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that these efforts, as well as COVAX and the many others currently underway, will someday be remembered in the same breath as The Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program.
If you’re unfamiliar with many of the straight up Herculean accomplishments that have been made by medical science worldwide over the past few months, you could be forgiven, after all we’ve all had quite a lot to be processing. If you need, however, some of the “right stuff” to inoculate you against all that doomscrolling that’s driving up your blood pressure and stealing your sleep, then by all means let me conclude this update by providing some positive Internet rabbit holes to get lost down. To start with, if you just have a few minutes and want to understand how all the forthcoming vaccines compare to one another, how they work, and what their status is currently, both The New York Times and CBC have excellent “vaccine tracker” interactives that are updated continuously. If you want to go deeper, however, here are some of my favourite bookmarks:
It’s Unfortunate That It Takes a Crisis for This to Happen by Steven D. Levitt for his podcast “People I (Mostly) Admire” is an interview with Moncef Slaoui about how the economics and science behind Operation Warp Speed produced results both thanks to, and in spite of, the current White House administration. Their candor is as enjoyable as the episode is informative, and since it’s just audio you can listen to this one even while doing housework after a tiring day of scrounging leftovers and home schooling kids.
The story of mRNA: How a once-dismissed idea became a leading technology in the Covid vaccine race by Damian Garde and Jonathan Saltzman for The Boston Globe is a great “longread” that will take you all the way from what Katalin Karikó was doing with messenger RNA (before grunge was a thing) all the way through the trials and tribulations at BioNTech and Moderna this year. This is the piece to start with if you’re wondering who else’s names to plug into Wikipedia to find out more about Tozinameran and mRNA-1273.
The Husband-and-Wife Team Behind the Leading Vaccine to Solve Covid-19 by David Gelles for The New York Times focuses in on a quick backgrounder for Dr. Ugur Sahin and Dr. Özlem Türeci, the BioNTech founders who I am completely convinced will become the first characters in this whole saga to become the subjects of a blockbuster Hollywood dramatization (optionally with or without Tom Hanks). I imagine someday they will be in our grandkids’ holographic textbooks next to Louis Pasteur and Jonas Salk.
Oxford vaccine: How did they make it so quickly? by James Gallagher for the BBC does an excellent job of summing up the development of AZD1222, the vaccine that might have the fewest high-tech headlines, but may end up being the biggest deal in the long run because of its relatively low cost, high durability, and compatibility with so many existing production facilities. If you’re impatient, the University of Oxford’s research folks have also produced a pithy one-and-a-half minute video about the process (also excellent for social sharing with anti-vax disinformers).
In addition to the miraculous reality of having vaccines to look forward to in the coming year, the other thing that’s been keeping me going through this has been all the support we’ve been getting from neighbours and friends, near and far. While many people we know have been agonizing over how often (or not) to visit grandparents who live nearby, we’ve been completely cut off from physically visiting our entire extended families for a full year now. Even as much as we’ve tended to move around through the years, that’s unprecedented for us. It’s been painfully isolating at times, especially during the several rounds we’ve now been through of discovering suspicious symptoms, locking down our household, checking for test results, and waiting to exhale. Every time something like that comes up, though, our Canadian peeps are here for us.
My phone buzzes with supportive messages, offers to drop off groceries, and inquiries to our well being. It may sound bizarre to say these days, but at the risk of repeating myself from Thanksgiving, when I lay awake these days I find myself feeling at least as lucky as I do exhausted or worried. We have not lost a family member throughout all this, as so many tragically have. We have not lost our income, our housing or food security, or our access to health care throughout all this, as so many tragically have. Our kids are even still able to go interact with their peers in public schools, a resource so many have tragically lost (and one we’re crossing our fingers to be able to return to after Ontario’s current shutdown). We’re hanging in there for now, we’re baking a lot of bread and playing a lot of Nintendo, and these days with New Year’s right around the corner, vaccination programs feel tangibly within reach. I also gotta say that, even from way up here, I’m really looking forward to how cathartic inauguration is going to feel in January, even if we can’t be there in person…but that’s another subject, for another time.
However your holiday season has been, I hope you have a support network that you can rely on, and I hope you and yours are safe as we all start this new year. Let’s hope, in the coming months, that things can get a whole lot better for everyone. We wish you a merry Christmas and a happier new year!
P.S. okay maybe just one more Star Trek reference, with thanks to John C. Worsley 😂
This Ontarian Life 
Really interesting take on the different perception and experience of the pandemic between Americans and Canadians. It can be hard for me to comprehend how people in the States aren’t more upset or angry or even scared. But it’s better for me to focus on the positives than to continually read the news.
And thank you for the links to keep me from doomscrolling — it’s such a bad habit right now.