COVID didn’t end. Its story just stopped being told.
After my last COVID infection, I was told by a healthcare worker that it was good I kept up with vaccinations, and based on how poorly I felt for months, it would be good if I avoided reinfection.
When I asked how I was to manage that sleight-of-hand in the world we now live in, she offered me familiar advice: Keep up with vaccination, mask in indoor settings during periods of high transmission.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that’s what I’ve done for the past few years. Or that my weakest flank when it comes to self-protection is being a parent with a kid in school. Being a woman may not help either. Research suggests women are at increased risk of developing Long COVID.
That’s the present-tense reality of the pandemic I’m expected to quietly accept — as if it were non-negotiable.
Five years after COVID emerged, I’m not surprised the public mood around the virus is now a mix of resentment and resignation. Many rightly intuit that they’re ill-equipped to prop up public health on their own.
As of 2023, about 3.5 million Canadians dealt with longer-term symptoms after a COVID infection. More than 2 million Canadians must cope with Long COVID in a climate where an estimated 6.5 million Canadians don’t have a primary care practitioner, a longstanding problem that’s only gotten worse over the pandemic.
It's commonplace to declare that People are Awful and Lockdowns Are to Blame for the way we live now, but as others have pointed out, both proclamations represent damaging forms of revisionism. The majority of Canadians supported public health interventions, assuming their sacrifices on behalf of one another were being undertaken so governments could buy time to invest in and shore up the resilience of healthcare, long-term care and educational systems.
Did that happen?
There are significant obstacles to answering that question in a meaningful way for the majority that wanted better. It takes time, resources and a mandate to investigate. It’s cheaper and more expedient for under-resourced newsrooms to tell the anger story rather than seriously tackling government performance. But presumably, the few people still reading the news are doing so because they expect to see some sort of commitment to accountability — they deserve no less.
As a journalist, I spent months trying to figure out what Ontario did to improve air quality in public schools during the pandemic. It turns out we did a little, but not nearly enough. It wasn’t how little we did in a moment of clear crisis that surprised me, however, but how low our standards for clean air in schools were prior to COVID.
Lockdowns should not take the heat for decades of underfunding education perpetuated by both Liberal and Conservative governments, which set schools up poorly to cope with a crisis. That was true in March 2020, and it’s true now.
That Canadians aren’t being supported through known complications of infection is a crisis of the moment, of 2025 – not 2020.
There’s no financial support when you spend three months in bed. Or a year. Or more.
After five years of managing the mood of an overwhelmed public, by deploying various iterations of “don’t panic” and “you don’t have to worry, only those other people, who aren’t like you, do,” and finally, ‘it’s over, get back to work,” the record is skipping.
It’s fair to say many good-faith actors in leadership roles didn’t game-out the resulting after effects. They failed to grasp what might evolve in response to institutionalized endorsements of ignorance, anger and indifference — engendering in the public a blend of skepticism, contempt and an overriding sense of futility.
They also failed to imagine what kind of leadership such a climate might inevitably empower.
One need only look to the United States, and the gleeful destruction of life-saving global and domestic public health infrastructure, to see the fruits. As it turns out, making public health a private responsibility may just have empowered the most abusive government in recent times to destroy it entirely. The ‘do your own research’ crowd is now absorbing the ‘you do you’ crew, and as a result both research and public health have taken devastating blows.
The U.S. example should provide a powerful motive here in Canada to course-correct pandemic-era narrative reflexes. A new story, one rooted in the way we live now, would necessitate the telling of present-day truths.
The idea that public health is not a collective responsibility but an unpaid contract gig for you and me should be put to bed in 2025. So too, the various other illusions of individual control. The idea that most people are empowered to do things like “stay home when sick,” or mask at work or install ventilation systems by personal fiat. That well-worn advice is shorthand for labour protections.
While it’s tempting to look back in anger, it’s wiser to ask if it’s not the investment of good faith in 2020 that grates so much in retrospect, as it is the return on that investment in 2025.
That line of inquiry, which holds leadership accountable, has the added benefit of potentially paying off in the future.
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Flannery Dean is a writer and editor based in Hamilton, Ont.