Don’t forget pandemic’s lessons

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/01/2024 (975 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Reports of a changed world post-COVID were, as it turns out, greatly exaggerated.

At the height of coronavirus pandemic restrictions, it was easy and commonplace to speculate as to just what the world would look like after humanity had navigated that modern wave of plague. And even the many who were not steeped in dystopian conspiracy theories could easily envision a world where preventing the spread of disease would be a top priority.

But now, a few years out from the pandemic’s beginning, it’s been shocking to see just how quickly we forget the lessons of history — even the history of just a few years ago.

This week, the Free Press reported on the crush of patients crowding intensive care units with the respiratory virus season in full swing. The pressure health-care providers currently face is at least in part owing to low vaccine uptake among Manitobans.

Less than 24 per cent of Manitobans have received their seasonal flut shot this year and only 18 per cent received a COVID-19 vaccine booster. They are surprising figures in terms of what they say about or own incorrigibilty. One would think a world where we wore masks everywhere and exchewed public gatherings en masse, was ancient history. Winnipeg epidemiologist Cynthia Carr is urging people to stay home when feeling sick, the first and simplest piece of advice everyone should have internalized during the height of the pandemic.

There are still some people wearing masks, but mask mandates themselves are long gone. We were all quite happy to return to the old ways – a world of handshakes and hockey games, of concerts and family dinners, of concerts and crowded malls. The question is: why aren’t we also happy to do the bare minimum in return?

The coronavirus, while largely curbed by vaccination efforts and other pandemic measures, does indeed still exist and continues to evolve into forms which may evade the defences offered by previous vaccines. Keeping vaccinations up to date, then, is of significant importance.

Seasonal flu shots should be old hat for the denizens of a wintry province. They were a safe, reliable precaution before the pandemic and continue to be one now, and for much the same reason: the version of the flu virus we try to protect against most changes from year to year.

Much ado has been made, in these pages and around the province, of how much weight has been put on the shoulders of health-care workers these past years. Nurses and other health workers have faced a never-ending onslaught of stressors, forced to work exhausting hours with too few people to share the load. And always, there has been hand-wringing about what is to be done to make things easier on them.

Well, here’s something we can all do: get the shots. For seasonal flu, and for COVID. It was all well and good to proudly line up at vaccination clinics to take part in the solution, and to snap smiling selfies with one’s “I got vaccinated!” sticker. But what about now, when no one is there to click the like button? It turns out, not many are interested.

Do we need to go back to a world of social distancing, masking, and capacity limits? No. If we ‘trust the science’ we must trust the medicine works as intended, and allows for us to carry on. But our own responsibilities to follow up, to keep our vaccinations up to date and take these illnesses seriously, is a major factor in whether we can continue with ‘normal’ indefinitely or if we’re headed for another crisis.

We have to keep up with the flu, and with COVID, because as the endless variants show, they’re sure trying to keep up with us.