On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the spread of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 to be a global pandemic.
That day, that week, everything changed. The coronavirus became COVID-19. The before time ended, and the pandemic era began.
Countries around the world that had been watching nervously since the first cases emerged in late 2019 – some of which were already neck-deep in cases – stepped up mitigation measures.
Canada began to “shut it down.” Hospital visits were banned. Borders were sealed. Schools were closed. So were workplaces. Holidays were nixed. Then came efforts to flatten the curve and social distancing – the six-foot rule, and the demarcations in stores and on sidewalks. (Some of these relics remain as cruel reminders.)
After some hesitation, masking became de rigueur. Debates about transmission – whether it was airborne or spread through droplets – raged. There was much talk about improving ventilation, but not much action.
There were bold predictions that it would all be over soon. U.S. President Donald Trump said a “miracle” would make coronavirus disappear. He kept saying it even after he was hospitalized with COVID, and embraced the ivermectin quackery.
A vaccine was developed in record time – just nine months. That was the miracle: the miracle of science. People queued up eagerly for the shot even as the anti-vaxxers railed about the “clot shot.”
Then came vaccine passports, and in some cases, curfews. There were more COVID waves, and virus mutations. Financial assistance programs, such as the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), cost billions. There was the so-called Freedom Convoy. Then came the eventual easing of restrictions, and the inevitable backlash, anger, and rewriting of the narrative.
Five years after the worst pandemic in a century began, the official death toll is 7 million deaths worldwide, but the actual number is likely three times higher, around 21 million, according to the World Health Organization.
It’s not over either. Last month alone, there were 3,100 COVID deaths reported worldwide, with 2,700 of those in the COVID-denying United States. (Canada stopped tracking late last year.)
More than 60,000 of those deaths happened in Canada, with that number rising to 165,000 if you consider excess deaths. Another 3.5 million Canadians have suffered from long COVID.
After years of political, social and economic upheaval, it’s worth asking: Did we get it right in the early days of COVID-19?
The short answer is: More or less. Being cautious is not the same as overreacting. If anything, the early response was too slow and too timid.
Yet, there has been an execrable level of revisionism over the last five years. A popular narrative today is that letting the coronavirus run wilder would have resulted in quick herd immunity, and that the COVID response did more damage than the virus itself.
That is unmitigated nonsense.
The response to the threat posed by the novel coronavirus was not perfect. Far from it. With so much uncertainty, how could it be?
Of course we could have done things differently. Hindsight is always 20/20.
But virtually every action taken by public health and politicians was well-intentioned, even if it wasn’t ideal.
People were inconvenienced, but they were not oppressed, even by the most far-reaching measures, such as lockdowns, curfews, and mask and vaccine mandates.
The sacrifices were not in vain, either. Five years on, it’s clear that countries that went hard and fast with mitigation measures saved lives. Japan recorded a COVID death rate of 597 per million population; Australia, 963. In contrast, Canada’s death rate was 1,424 per million, compared to 3,567 in the U.S. Britain’s COVID inquiry heard that acting one week earlier would have saved 30,000 lives.
Vaccines are also imperfect, but they nonetheless saved lives too – 14.4 million lives, according to one study.
Looking back, one of the most shocking aspects of the pandemic was the way we normalized death and illness.
For the first three years of the pandemic, COVID-19 was the third-leading death in the country, after only cardiovascular disease and cancer.
In nursing homes, in particular, where almost half of all pandemic deaths occurred, we witnessed a massacre of neglect. Yet, too often, the shocking level of death was dismissed with a they-were-going-to-die-anyhow shrug.
It’s a reminder that COVID reinforced and magnified inequalities and prejudices, and revealed our disdain for the vulnerable.
The pandemic left many people isolated, angry, and morally wounded. Conspiratorial and anti-science thinking soared; minimizers and revisionists triumphed.
But let’s not forget that the real enemy was the coronavirus, not the response.
It’s COVID-19 that left a trail of destruction – one that will only be made worse if we continue to embrace collective amnesia and denialism.