As the virus turns...
This past Christmas has had the oddly familiar feeling of one of those endless daytime soap operas. The Twilight Zone is another classic TV reference that comes to mind to describe the past few weeks.
In my last column I talked about how I had COVID. I also referred to my banishment to the bedroom...well...it didn’t work.
Yes, I’m better, but despite being holed up for the then-required 10 (now just five) days of self-isolation, I still managed to infect my son, meaning living in pods and delivering food to bedroom doors continued for almost three weeks.
We’re told he most likely got sick from me, thus I most likely cannot be re-infected by him, which means I’m now the one “answering the bell” or, more accurately, responding to the text.
It astonishes me he got infected, given all the protocols we had in place. (The skin on my hands is almost falling off for all the washing.) But there’s the “aerosol effect” for you.
These COVID droplets are teensy tiny and can travel in the air, not just six feet but throughout the house.
It explains why Dr. Bonnie Henry is warning businesses to prepare to have at least a third of their workforce home sick. It also explains why my son’s experience with public health was radically different than mine.
When he went to get a COVID test, he wasn’t even given the option of a PCR test but simply handed a rapid test and told to do it at home. Along with the test was a sheet of information that said if the test was positive, to submit the result online. He did that, and that was the last we heard of it.
There was no lovely phone call from public health asking how he was doing, where he might have been exposed, if he has mental health or addictions issues that would make it hard to self-isolate, as I got just days earlier.
A reader also emailed me to say her experience with public health was nothing like I had described in my column, adding she was so sick the first couple of days she couldn’t bring herself to go online and submit her results.
“I wonder how many people just don’t bother. Is there a way to estimate unreported positive rapid tests? An estimated X per cent out of Y thousand tests given out? Someone’s got to be doing that modelling,” she pondered.
In fact, an infectious disease expert I heard on CBC’s The National did exactly that modelling and concluded the infection rate is about five times higher than what’s being recorded.
Clearly, the testing/contact tracing system is overwhelmed, but while it’s a shame to not have your hand held, what really matters is hospital capacity.
At this point, B.C. hospitals are stretched but appear to be managing, but we’ll see how long that lasts. Our infection rates are a couple of weeks behind Ontario’s, where some hospitals have already issued a “Code Orange.” But, frankly, we don’t need a “Code Orange” hospital alert to know our health care system overall is in crisis.
The heat dome last June, which saw nearly 600 heat-related deaths in B.C. and multiple-hour waits for ambulances, was just the most obvious of the flashing lights.
But a couple of things can (hopefully) come from a crises: clarity and curiosity.
It’s a bit like the financial crash in 2008 that suddenly made many of us pay attention to the remarkable fragility of a banking system we’ve all come to rely so heavily on.
The Byzantine complexity of our supply chain is another system that has come under greater scrutiny as products fail to show up where they should, when they should.
So here’s my resolution for 2022: take the odd deep dive (it’s not going to be a daily thing) into understanding how these systems work.
Like others ADHDers, I am captivated by the bit-by-bit news world, but that alone isn’t going to provide the perspective we need to build resiliency. For that, we need to look, from time to time, at the picture on the cover of the puzzle box to see how the pieces fit together.
