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On this day four years ago, our front page changed because our world had changed in ways that still reverberate.
PANDEMIC HITS HOME was the headline screaming across all five columns of A1 as we reported on Manitoba’s first confirmed cases of COVID-19. The only other major element on the page was a column from Melissa Martin with a prescient headline, which read: When real-world drama, dystopian fiction meet.
The Free Press front page for March 13, 2020.
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Our newsroom had no real idea what lay ahead of us, but we knew we needed a front-page design reflective of a world that had moved to war-footing to battle with a viral enemy none of us could see and for which none of us had immunity.
Immediately we jettisoned the left-handle column of pointers, which usually direct readers to lighter stories on our inside pages. When you are entering the darkness of a pandemic, lighter news is among the first casualties.
I remember that fateful day as if it were yesterday, even though I wish I could forget much of what happened in the 1,461 days that followed.
Thankfully, the global health emergency has ended. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean COVID is gone.
Instead, it is here to stay, lingering in the corners as an endemic illness — still able to infect, still possessing the power to upend lives, still eager to kill.
Tonight’s COVID reflections are not meant to bring you down. Nor are they a precursor to a return to my nightly newsletter of pandemic reflections, which served as the long-running forerunner to this newsletter.
Rather, I’m simply marking a point in time, much like that front page we pivoted to when COVID quietly slipped into our province and our lives.
No doubt, you have your own COVID reference points to reflect upon, should you choose.
I’ll end by sharing one more of my mine. I scrolled through my phone last night and came across a video message I sent to the Grade 6 students at Brock Corydon School in June 2021 at the behest of their teacher, who wanted something special for the ceremony that would mark the end of their elementary school journey.
In that graduation greeting, I drew on the wisdom A. A. Milne delivered through Winnie the Pooh. “Don’t ever forget how brave, how strong and how smart you have been,” I implored the class, which had endured remote learning, masking and more than I could have imagined when I was their age.
Paul Samyn addresses students graduating from Grade 6 in 2021. Watch his speech here.
Today, those students will be eagerly looking forward to a spring break that can include travel far and wide. Come September, they will graduate again, this time to high schools without social distancing.
That’s a prognosis far better than the one staring at us on March 13, 2020. That’s why I am marking today, smiling at the possibilities all within their reach, rather than with the laments from a time when we were all holding our breath.
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