COVID 19

Canada and the world are on edge as a result of the COVID 19 pandemic.  There is probably not a single person in Canada that has not been impacted by it at this point.

Maybe you have kids who are off of school for the next three weeks.  Maybe you are a university student who is now taking classes on-line and you are probably looking forward to taking on-line exams.  Maybe you are just missing hockey, basketball or any other activities or sports that have been cancelled as a result of the outbreak.

Maybe you are someone who has contracted the virus or you know someone who has.

Personally, I have been told to stay home from work and not go back until further notice.  Having time off is great but it is less enjoyable considering that I cannot go anywhere.  

I am not an expert on infectious deceases but I have the feeling that this is going to get worse before it gets better.  Then again maybe it will not.  I really do not know and I do not believe anybody knows.

In order to get some idea I am forced to consult the media.  I do not trust the media as far as I can throw my car and I have not paid for news in over two decades.  That includes watching commercial news stations such as CTV, CBC or CNN.  Unfortunately, I have no other choice in the current situation.  Fortunately, I have found them to be stepping up their game during this outbreak.  I am finding the information that they are imparting to be informative and for the most part they are steering away from the hyperbola and sensationalism that the media always engages in during a crisis.  Perhaps they have realized that this pandemic is sensational enough on its own without them trying to pump it up any more to increase their ratings and revenues.

One thing I will say however is there are still journalists out there who cannot seem to resist the urge to editorialize or give "advice" to governments, either during the stories themselves or in so called "opinion" pieces.  The editorializing is always critical of the actions of a government and I have no idea on what basis the "advice" is being given.

To those journalists I say STOP.  This pandemic is a once in a century event.  The last one took place in 1918 when the only way to cross oceans was on ocean liners that took almost a week to travel from Portsmouth to NYC.  There are no templates for how to handle this in the jet age.  Everybody in government, the politicians, the bureaucrats, and the outside experts, like doctors, are flying by the seat of their pants trying to come up with ways to mitigate the impacts of the pandemic.  There are no right answers on how to do that and how the pandemic unfolded in one country is of limited use in deciding how to handle it in another country because there are way too many variables.

Further, you are journalists.  You are trained on how to communicate information.  You are not trained in anything else.  I went to Carleton University in Ottawa, which has a journalism school, and all of the journalism students I knew took courses like political science or history as their electives.  They did not take science classes and they certainly did not take medical school classes because Carleton does not have a medical school.  

For the most part the journalistic habit of giving advice about something they know little about is more amusing than anything else.  However, it is not amusing in this situation.  It is a simple fact that we are going to have to trust the experts, and the governments they are speaking through, to guide us through this and that means we should not be overly critical of them at this point.  The time for that will be when it is over and the postmortems on how the pandemic was handled begin.  This applies to all governments, regardless of their political stripe, whether it be the Trudeau government, the Ford government or the Trump administration.  Regardless of your personal opinions of those governments I am reasonably certain that all of them are trying to do the best they can under nearly impossible circumstances.

How this outbreak will progress is anybody's guess.  If, in January when this virus first hit the headlines, someone would have told me that Italy, two-thirds of a continent away from ground zero of the outbreak, would be as devastated as it has been I would have labeled that person a loony.  So all we can do is hunker down, take care of each other and listen to the experts who are talking through our elected officials. When we all come out on the other side in a few months we can then take a critical look at how those governments handled the situation.