It’s March 18, 2020 and in the coming days, the Government of Canada will likely pass emergency legislation that will mandate that all Canadians must stay in their homes until the emergency passes at some future date.
Of course, people will be allowed out to gather the essentials like food, medicine; and for certain jobs that are critical to the functioning of the economy.
In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past 2 months, the reason for these extraordinary measures is a virus. A novel coronavirus that causes an infection called COVID-19.
At first, it was thought that this virus caused only minor symptoms like a cold or mild flu. Then people started dying in China en masse from a pneumonia-like complication. All of a sudden this virus was serious business.
It’s a China Problem
Or so the world thought…It all started in Wuhan China and has now become the greatest global health catastrophe in 100 years.
According to the latest reports, it’s likely that the first case appeared in mid November 2019. From that point on, the virus continued to spread undetected until patients began flooding hospitals in Wuhan China in late December and Early January.
By mid-January Chinese officials began to realize the threat the virus posed and locked down Hubei Province that’s home to nearly 60 million people. To put that in perspective, that’s the population of Italy.
As the number of death from the virus soared, Chinese officials locked down the whole country. And the rest is history unfolding before our eyes.
I First Heard About it Before Disney
Like many of you, I was following the Coronavirus thing back in January. I thought it was pretty serious if China shut down its entire country. But didn’t give it too much thought because the narrative was that the Chinese Government had it under control.
So I went about my business as usual, after all I was headed to Disney World! We had a great vacation and the place was packed because the new Star Wars theme park had just opened in December.
After long days at the parks I relaxed in our room and caught up on the news. It wasn’t good. The Coronavirus thing was getting worse…not better.
It started hitting all the milestones: the number of cases surpassed the 2003 SARS outbreak, number of cases passed 10,000, number of reported deaths broke 1,000. China was building in hospitals like crazy, people were dying left and right.
I just carried on with my vacation. I flew home at the end of January and fully expected tough screening leaving Orlando and on arrival in Toronto.
When I arrived at the airport Nothing! Just a piece of paper saying that if you visited Wuhan City or the Hubei province of China report any flu like symptoms.
That made me think that no one is taking this thing seriously maybe it’s no big deal…
Novel Coronavirus Spreads
Stopping the spread of the novel Coronavirus proved to be nearly impossible because people are infectious before they even show symptoms. So testing people for fever at the airport never would have really worked.
Further complicating things is that some people have no symptoms at all, but can spread it to others who end up in intensive care!
But we all had early warning signs that this disease was highly contagious. Remember the plight of the cruise ship passengers on the Diamond Princess docked in Yokohama, Japan? It started out with 1 positive case, passengers were quarantined within a week or 2 cases soared to over 600!
Still Governments failed to act. They repatriated these people (and those stuck in the Wuhan) and quarantined them on army bases for 2 weeks. All good right?
Meanwhile, officials at the World Health Organization were sounding the alarm. All February they were telling Western governments to take this thing seriously and prepare. Their call to action fell on deaf ears.
Next, the virus struck South Korea and life here carried on as usual.
For a while it seemed like just maybe China had the situation under control and that South Korea was effective at containing their outbreak.
Then news broke about thousands of infections in Iran and shortly after Italy. Both of which have proved much deadlier than the numbers that came out of China.
In recent days, cases have soared in the European Union, with Spain and Italy leading the way in both infections and fatalities.
Now the UK, France and the United States have thousands of infections and by the end of the week tens of thousands.
Along the way we are learning some pretty scary things about this new virus…like contrary to what we’ve been told, it doesn’t just kill old people and others with underlying conditions.
There are reports from Italy, Spain and the US that there is a rise in the number of Millennials in the ICUs. This was confirmed by Ontario’s Health Minister, although no one knows if those people had underlying conditions.
I’m not writing this to scare anyone, but there have been lots of people that just aren’t taking this thing seriously.
The number of people going to the ICU with this infection is scary. Each one of them requires a ventilator to breathe and specialist doctor and medicine. Maybe we can make more ventilators for the coming wave of infections but getting doctors, nurses and other medical specialists will prove much more difficult.
The World Woke Up Last Wednesday
Last Wednesday the Western World finally woke up to the threat posed by this novel Coronavirus. The experience of Italy has the G7 Government scared sh*tless.
The stock market collapsed, oil collapsed, and a Global Recession is upon us. Borders are closed, schools are closed and probably will be for months. People are working from home if they can. The travel industry, hotels, airlines, etc. are particularly hard hit. The service industry too.
Grocery stores have empty shelves. Pharmacies are low on medication. There are major supply disruptions and at this time there are no indications that this situation will resolve itself anytime soon.
Health Canada estimated that this pandemic flu could hit between 30 to 70 percent of the population. If even 4 or 5 per cent of those cases go to the ICU the numbers are staggering: between half a million and over a million people might need a ventilator in the ICU…That’s a scary thought.
I hope everyone stays healthy and this things ends soon. Life will go on and we will recover. In the meantime, we can all do our part by practicing social distancing and following the advice of health professionals.