No reasoning with those who deny the obvious

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/11/2020 (1760 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I don’t understand those who keep saying COVID-19 is just a media-fed lie. Or nothing worse than the flu. I don’t know what bubble they are living in. Frankly, I would like to live there, too. It seems like a wonderful place to be, but it’s not Winnipeg right now.

I had the pleasure of going for my first COVID-19 test on Tuesday. I am not the first person I know to have had to do that. I asked my students at the University of Manitoba on Monday (I teach by Zoom) if any of them have been tested. One student told me he’d already had the cotton swab up his nose twice, both times because of his job. Other friends have told me that because of their children, they’ve made the trip to testing centres several times to ensure their offspring were COVID-free before resuming school (and had to self-isolate until then).

The people who deny COVID-19 is a big deal must not know anyone who’s ever been tested, despite the fact we’ve had close to 315,500 tests done in Manitoba since early February — about a quarter of our entire population.

I have a good friend who is panicked as she worries about how her 82-year-old mother is doing in a personal care home in Winnipeg. Her mom tested positive for COVID-19 last week and my friend has been told the home may have had an outbreak, but there’s been no further information provided. My friend can’t contact her mom by telephone, because she is too arthritic to hold a phone, and my friend worries about her personal well-being because she’s becoming increasingly frail and lonely.

Those who have stood outside with anti-mask protest signs, not only in Steinbach but also at the provincial legislature in Winnipeg, must not know of anyone worried about elderly parents or grandparents in care. Or haven’t read the horror stories being revealed by paramedics who visited the Maples Personal Care Home, where those who were the most vulnerable were left to fend for themselves because staffing levels were too low.

Those people making nasty comments on Twitter that COVID-19 is killing people who are old and have pre-existing conditions anyway must not be aware that the people who are dying are also 30-year-olds and 20-year-olds and younger, who even with pre-existing conditions expected to live longer than this.

They didn’t want to die alone, without the solace of a loved one’s touch. It makes my heart break to think that in those last days, families can’t say goodbye and can’t comfort each other.

It’s cavalier to talk about being sheep, and being lied to by government, when you aren’t paying attention to what’s actually happening. Instead, you’d rather be lied to and led by conspiracy theorists, believing that COVID-19 is some government plot to make you stay at home. But what would be the intention of that? It isn’t logical.

Of course, no amount of berating is going to get through to people who deny the obvious. You can use numbers and quote experts in this fight against the spread of the pandemic. It’s not going to help.

The mass of disinformation Premier Brian Pallister and his government are facing right now is the same sort of disinformation climate-change activists have been fighting for years. No matter how hard environmental scientists have tried to use science to explain how and why climate change is occurring, there is always resistance, in large part motivated by those who fear and resist change that requires a fundamental rethinking of our economy.

A pandemic creates similar challenges. Right now, we have to close doors and slow the spread, meaning our economy will suffer. That’s going to be tough.

Pallister has had to backtrack on his government’s traipse into “Ready. Safe. Grow. #RestartMB” territory, and now he’s having to clean up his government’s own mess. Some of his caucus are doing a great job on damage control (I’m looking at you, Rochelle Squires and Cliff Cullen). Some are failing miserably (the health minister and education minister need to look for new portfolios).

The bottom line is this: the economy can’t come back when everyone is either sick, caring for someone who is sick, self-isolating or dying. And no anti-mask protests or conspiracy theories are going to change that.

Shannon Sampert is a political scientist and media consultant.

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shannon@mediadiva.ca

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