Well. That was a day.

I spent the day outside!

I love pulling dandelions and picking rocks. The closer my face and hands get to the soil, the happier I feel. We hit the Elora Cataract Trail today too. Thank you, Premier Ford, for opening the trails. We cycled past quite a few people. Maintaining that six feet of distance was easy. Canadians are so polite. We peeled off to the side of the trail and they did too.

Spring is late but it is here, finally. I lost myself in the sound of the birds tonight. For a brief moment, I closed my eyes and it felt like the world was back to normal.

The world will go back to normal. We will heal and we will rebuild. And my hope is that we will learn from this experience how valuable our relationships are and how fragile, yet resilient our planet is.

A little bit of flu/corona virus pandemic education: The world has survived pandemics before and we will again. No flu or coronavirus epidemic/ pandemic in the last century has lasted longer than 18 months.

The Spanish flu, also known as the 1918 flu pandemic, was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus. It lasted from the spring of 1918 to the early summer of 1919.

SARS was another coronavirus that was much deadlier than COVID 19. It lasted between November 2002 and July 2003.

The 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, also caused by an influenza virus lasted from April 2009 to April 2010.

All of these viral outbreaks were self-limited and only one, the H1N1 pandemic, had a vaccine.

The take home message is, this virus will not be with us forever. It will not wipe out our culture as we knew it. The world will look different. I hope it is better. We were on a very destructive path of over consuming and environmental degradation.

The Spanish flu was the deadliest and like today, people were clamouring for the restrictions to be lifted so they could go back to life as normal. One city that did well was Seattle which imposed increasingly strict restrictions and kept them in place for five weeks. Officials closed schools, prohibited church services, shortened work hours and mandated the wearing of masks in public. A second wave hit and the city immediately went to a quarantine system but did not have to re-impose tough physical distancing measures. Instead, people with the infection were quarantined.

This it the path we are taking. As we continue to see a consistent reduction in the number of new daily COVID 19 cases, more and more restrictions will be lifted and more people will head back to work.

We have what we need to do this.
1/ There is sufficient acute and critical care hospital capacity to respond to potential surges, if they happen.

2/ We have the capacity to do contact tracing which requires that 90 percent of new COVID 19 case contacts be reached and quarantined by public health officials within one day.

3/ We have the ability to do ongoing testing of suspected cases to detect new outbreaks quickly.

We are ready and we must slowly re-open the economy and slowly lessen the social distancing restrictions. The harm done to the economy and the emotional and physical well being of the masses will far outweigh the damage that this virus is capable of. We are already close to the point where more harm is inevitable.

Remember, the incidence of COVID 19 is very low in most smaller communities. In Guelph there is only 1 case/1000 and the death rate is far, far less than 1 %. We can confidently return to work when we are given the green light. Our risk is low.

We are playing out the wrong story. Fear and panic is doing more harm than the virus. We need to reorient away from fear and onto a confident path toward healing and recovery.

Don't miss out on the beauty that is all around you. Fear will rob you of seeing that beauty.

Happy Spring.

Anne-Marie

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