Our
COVID March 2020 to March 2021
BY PIETA WOOLLEY
O
n March 17, 2020, British Columbia declared a public health emergency with 83 cases of COVID-19 and three deaths. Bars, schools and some courthouses were shut down. Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry hardly a household name at the time - ordered businesses to institute a host of new regulations, from social distancing to sanitizing. A whole new lexicon entered our lives (see Page 14.) Daily life quickly took a Twilight Zone-like turn. Remember the great toilet paper panic of March 2020? Your first meeting on Zoom? Google classrooms? This St. Patrick's Day, ironically a day popularly dedicated to drinking whiskey, we celebrate a year of surviving the first of this kind of pandemic since polio. At press time, fewer than 60 locals had been diagnosed with COVID (about 1 in 333 people). Most of BC has not been so lucky. At press time, 78,278 people in this province have been diagnosed with COVID-19 (about 1 in 64 people), and 1,338 have died. What's to come as we enter year two? Futurists wisely admit that predicting the future is truly impossible, because people want to guess what will happen later based on what is hap-
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• March 2021 • prliving.ca
YEAR pening now. And, as COVID has proven, there are always unknowns lurking. Based on what we know now, however, the next year is a race between two factors. We have several very effective vaccines that are available, but will take until at least the fall of 2021 to reach all Canadian adults who want one. In the meantime, the virus is mutating. Some new strains are faster-spreading, better at finding new bodies to infect. Will Powell River evade more COVID, until we're all vaccinated? This pandemic is about much more than just a virus, of course. Over the next pages, you'll see that it's about people caring for each other, professionals stepping up, history drifting back into our collective consciousness, money, time, and continually re-inventing how we move (and don't move) in the world. Testing our values. Tapping our strengths. Feeling our weaknesses. No one would choose to endure what COVID-19 has brought here, or across the globe - with 2.5 million deaths so far. But reflecting on the images and stories on the next few pages, I can't help but appreciate that living with the virus has so often brought out the best in us. Even as COVID-19 becomes, at some point hopefully not too far away, history. Our best has been sharpened, and will endure.
