Hey, remember the spring of 2020 when gas fell below a buck a litre? Good times, good times.
That was right after the entire planet drove into the ditch, two years ago today.
We were already in a full-blown toilet paper panic by then, but it wasn’t until March 11 that three game-changers let us know that life as we knew it was over: the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic, the NBA shut down and Tom Hanks tested positive — that last one being COVID’s way of finding the most likeable guy in the room and punching him in the face, just to show that nobody was safe.
Also on that day in 2020: Vancouver Island recorded its first COVID case, a man in his sixties who had just returned from Egypt. Thank goodness all that pesky pandemic business is behind us now. Same goes for climate change.
What’s that you say? The pandemic is still with us? Yes, yes it is, though you would hardly know it by the way the old normal is returning.
Packed restaurants, full seating at Canucks games, friends flying off to Mexico, dormant events reawakening.
The pandemic is like The Walking Dead, where nobody could turn away from the horror for the first couple of seasons but then it dragged on too long and we got tired of waiting for it to end. Now you stumble across it while flipping channels and go: “Jeez, is that show still on?”
Yup, it sure is. Unvaccinated British Columbians continue to make up a disproportionate number of those in hospital with COVID. People are still dying. Nonetheless, things are trending in the right direction, so we learned Thursday that mask mandates will start coming off today and vaccine cards on April 8.
It has been obvious those changes were coming, though that didn’t stop some of the Ottawa protest types from plotting a convoy to Victoria. Not to be critical, but that kind of sounds like marching into a theatre five minutes before the end of the movie and demanding, um, the end of the movie. Or maybe they just like the sound of their own voices. Or air horns.
Besides, being invaded by a tinfoil-helmeted army just as our downtown businesses are starting to recover would only be par for the course, given what we have been through since March 11, 2020.
Remember that first year? Workplaces emptied, the airport got cobwebs and the streets were as empty as Oak Bay after dark. Sweat pants. COVID hair. CERB. “Flatten the curve.”
Wine for supper at 4 p.m and asleep under the bed by 8:30. Distilleries pivoted (a word that was beaten to death) to make hand sanitizer. “Don’t touch your face.” Even playgrounds were taped off; it sucked to be an only child, stuck at home, friendless except for the family dog and Wilson the volleyball.
Old people were isolated in nursing homes, their children bellowing at them through sealed windows. We learned to use (and learned to hate) Zoom. Couldn’t drive around Victoria with Alberta licence plates without being stoned to death by the self-appointed Pandemic Police. Sorry, but Tiger King cannot be unwatched.
OK, we said, things will get better after one trip around the calendar. And they did, after science triumphed and a vaccine went into broad circulation. (Remember the pre-pandemic days when “I just got my second dose!” was not something you wanted to exclaim out loud?)
Except just as we were high-fiving one another, along came the Delta variant, barging in like a drunken cousin late for the family reunion. And then came its pal Omicron.
And oh, don’t forget the non-COVID parts of 2021, including a deadly summer heat dome (a new term to most of us) that was followed by catastrophic wildfires that razed homes, uprooted thousands and darkened skies with an apocalyptic orange smoke that turned Interior streetlights on at mid-day.
Then came November’s atmospheric river (another new term), wreaking the kind of damage more normally associated with the Old Testament. The supply chain came apart like a $5 umbrella as not only the Malahat but the Trans Mountain pipeline, highways and railways linking the Lower Mainland to the Interior were severed. Apparently climate change is still a thing after all.
All of which has left us a tad frazzled. New Angus Reid Institute polling shows four in five Canadians believe the pandemic brought out the worst, not the best, in people.
But things change. Year three is looking up already. Take a deep breath — with or without a mask.
