Columnists
Out of the lockdown and into…?
So what did you do last Wednesday? Did you go hog wild in celebration of the fact that our area—the Hastings and Prince Edward public health unit—was tied with the Renfrew unit and the Kingston, Frontenac and Lennox & Addington unit in the race to be first out of the lockdown gate? Did you go into a restaurant and order a sit down plate of hot buttered toast, just because you could?
The party spirit was dulled somewhat by the “section 22” order of our local medical officer of health, Piotr Oglaza, that came out the day before the stay at home order was lifted. It prevented accommodation providers, restaurants and personal service providers in our area from serving anyone from another zone who was subject to a stay at home order. So Torontonians can’t yet come to the County’s restaurants to order their own hot buttered toast: they will just have to smell it from a distance.
Moreover, we are not free of other restrictions. We are still subject to the “green zone” rules. We must stay home if we have Covid symptoms, stay two metres apart from people we don’t live with, wear a mask in indoor public spaces and avoid non-essential travel. We must limit our close contact to members of our own household. Indoor social gatherings are limited to 10 people. Restaurants can’t serve food buffet-style or seat more than six people at a table. Worse still, we can’t go to our local casino and play poker, blackjack or roulette— those games that everyone plays to round out a normal life.
At least our area is not being plunged back into the yellow, orange, red, gray or lockdown zones, with their progressively stringent limitations. Yesterday, for example, the Leeds Grenville and Lanark area went green; Peterborough went yellow; Ottawa went orange; and Simcoe Muskoka went red. The fate of the four regions that are still subject to the stay at home order—North Bay Parry Sound, Toronto, York and Peel hangs in the balance and is to be determined by February 22.
Premier Rob Ford and chief medical officer of health Dr. David Williams have both said that they would not hesitate to use the “emergency brake” that could pull us back into a more restrictive zone—or even issue another provincial stay at home order—if cases spike. With so few cases to serve as a baseline, an outbreak in our area could quickly wreck our numbers and lead to one of those results.
I suspect the government has loosened restrictions now because it realizes people can’t sustain an indefinite lockdown. They need to catch their breath before they have to tackle the next wave of Covid presented by the emerging “variants of concern.” In answer to a question at his press briefing last Monday, Dr. Steine Brown of the University of Toronto school of public health talked of the near certainty of a fresh wave of infections caused by these variants In addition, the vaccine won’t be available to many of us for another three of four months or more. So I am fearful that things will get worse and we won’t stay in the green zone for very long.
I also confess to having a sense of personal guilt on two fronts. One, I confess to having a feeling of liberation in having my personal freedom of movement curtailed. Stuck in my house, I didn’t have to think about whether to go out and what I would do if I went out. My only choice was just to stay home. Mind you, I would no doubt think differently if I had a school-age child at home to parent and tutor, or a housebound senior to care for. Two, I have asked why I should expose myself to the risk of closer and more frequent contact with others, just because I can. Yet I can’t believe that I might even contemplate not associating with friends with whom I had happily shared personal space in the innocent pre- Covid era.
Times have changed.
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