So It's a New Year - by Sharon Flood Kasenberg

A new year has begun, and we want to believe that 2021 will usher in a happier era. Hope is a good thing, and I want that as bad as the rest of you - but we have to be realistic. Covid-19 isn't gone yet, and won't be until vaccines have broad use. People are still getting sick and dying. Just ten minutes ago, one of my Brazilian boys told me about a family connection who died of Covid-19 this morning.

"He was such a nice man, and I'm heartbroken", he told me. "We can't even have a funeral."

Covid is a very cruel virus. It doesn't care how nice you are, how rich you are, or even how careful you try to be, and that's why all of us need to continue being responsible. How we conduct ourselves can so easily determine the fate of those around us.

As a society, we haven't done very well so far. Most couldn't, or wouldn't, make the required sacrifices over the holiday season, and cases will continue to surge in the weeks to come.

Someone close to me told me that we could all "interpret the (Provincial) guidelines by our own light" - and then caught Covid. Luckily, she did not make the visit to her aging mother that she considered making! The guidelines have been clear from the beginning:

1) Stay within your household.

I grow increasingly frustrated with the number of people who don't understand what a household is. Sadly, your household includes only the people who live under your roof full time - not your grown children and grandchildren who live in separate houses! 

I'm astonished by the number of people who defied that rule over Christmas. Don't try to tell me that your four adult kids, their spouses and your grandkids are all part of your "household"! If you felt that you absolutely had to spend Christmas with all of your kids, I hope you took every single possible precaution to stay safe. I'll be honest - my mom joined our household for Christmas. She's 89, and doesn't have many Christmases left. She lives in assisted living, which means she technically doesn't live alone. That's the frustrating part - had my mom lived alone, across the street from me, where we could visit daily that would've been no issue. (A single person living alone can join with another household to have their social needs met.) However, because my mom lives in assisted living, where she gets communal meals, but spends 95% of her time alone, she is supposedly not lonely! Which is ridiculous, because she's never been so lonely in her life. So, I "sprung her" for the duration of the lockdown. I brought her from a red zone to an orange zone, where she will be happier and safer. For more than two weeks before she came here she had no visitors except me. She wore masks and distanced from the other residents. Did your family visitors take the precautions?

One of my friends told me how she visited one of her kids on Christmas Eve and the other on Christmas Day "because they weren't in the same bubble". What???? First off, the concept of "social bubbles" was so entirely (and perhaps deliberately?) misunderstood that they have been forbidden for months. The idea was simple - up to ten people total could form an exclusive pact that they would visit closely (no masks, no distancing) with each other - and ONLY each other. Instead, people chose to interpret that as "it's okay to hang out with no precautions as long as there are ten people or fewer gathering." The next day, you could get together with a different group of ten - and so on, and so on...and naturally the numbers soared!

Why more people couldn't understand the problem with this is a mystery to me. My household never joined any bubble, simply because we didn't feel we could trust anybody else to make the same sacrifices we were trying to make. One person looked at me incredulously when I told her that no, if my younger son lived nearby, we would not visit with him without distancing. He has the mind of a scientist and is every bit as careful about Covid as my husband and I are. He would've joined our household permanently or visited from a distance - period.

Until more learn to sacrifice the hugs they want now for an unlimited supply later, the social isolation will have to continue.

2) Stay home!

That should be an easy one too, but when the Finance Minister thinks he should be able to travel to St. Bart's for the holidays, everyone thinks travel is fine and dandy. 

In my opinion, international travel for pleasure should've been immediately forbidden as of March 2020. The countries that have been insistent on no tourists, like New Zealand, have low numbers because they seized control quickly. Stay home! It works!

Yes, you can walk in the neighbourhood. Yes, you can shop for essentials. Yes, you can go for a drive. Stay home means don't visit friends, don't spend time doing recreational shopping, don't congregate in groups outside unless you distance and mask.

It has been disheartening to learn that the average dog understands "stay" better than most humans.

3) Maintain two metres of distance from those not in your household, and wear a mask when that is difficult.

For those unfamiliar with the metric system, that's about six and a half feet. If your husband is six feet tall, try to imagine if him lying on the ground between you and the person you are talking to, with six inches to spare. In my experience, most people seem to think four or five feet looks like two metres. Always err on the side of caution. Don't assume you can stand two feet away from someone and chat for hours because you are both masked. Maintaining distance is the single most important precaution you can take to halt the spread. The mask is meant to be an added precaution when you can't. So mask up before you head out to shop, and if you want to walk in a crowded neighbourhood where a whole lot of other people might have the same idea, put it on there too.

4) Wash/sanitize your hands.

We can sing the Happy Birthday song twice through at home, and squirt on lots of sanitizer in stores, but neither gives us license to touch everything in our path, or to touch those around us. In the grocery store, I try my best not to touch things I don't buy. In my home, I try not to touch surfaces too often, and to clean them with disinfectant more often than usual. We all need to try to touch our masks less often - I can only hope that we don't end up wearing them so long that proper masking hygiene becomes second nature to us. Whether that happens depends on how well we obey the first three rules I listed above.

I don't do everything perfectly where the pandemic is concerned, but I'm trying. Can we all try a little bit harder, please?

For the poetry portion of this post I'm re-vamping an existing song....

So It's A New Year

So it's a new year
what will we do now?
Protect those around us?
We ought to know how!
and so Happy New Year
to weak and to strong -
mask up and stay safe now,
vaccines won't be long!

A very happy new year
to all of my friends.
Let's hope it's a good one,
and pandemic ends!

If we are united
in staying at home
the virus will slow down
with no place to roam.
We're none of us special -
exempt from the rules -
and those who pay no heed,
are nothing but fools.

The vaccines are coming.
Til then wear a mask,
and stay with your household
it's not much to ask!

Sharon Flood Kasenberg, January 1, 2021

Last year was supposed to be the year of  "2020 Vision" - perfect clarity! In hindsight, I can clearly see how a lot of us made mistakes early on in the pandemic. As time goes on, and Covid continues to gain ground, we absolutely must unite in making the sacrifices necessary to slow the spread of Covid before vaccinations are amped up! Our hospitals are struggling, our elderly are lonely, and far too many of us are at risk!

Do you want to have a better 2021? Stay safe, stay home, and comply with the lockdown!

Vaccines are coming, but not in time to save all of us. We have to do our part.