The Ides of Corona March

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar play is a tragedy in genre. In the second scene of act i, a soothsayer (person who foresees the future) warns the Roman Emperor with these words, “Beware the Ides of March,” repeated once before the soothsayer leaves the stage. We the audience know in hindsight, that the “Ides” refer to the middle of March, the 15th, the date when Caesar will be stabbed to death in an assassination. Here I sit and compose this blog on the 15th of March 2020. Our world is in the midst of an horrific pandemic of the COVID-19 (Corona) virus. On my long run out in the country north of our home this morning, I thought a lot about this/our viral situation, its meaning, our responses, and mostly our responsibilities both personal and social. My blog’s created purpose was/is about reflecting on meanings in my life, undressing and walking around my own perspectives and experiences in life. I don’t see myself as a social activist. However, I do view myself as someone who takes health and well being of/for myself and others very seriously. Today, on the world’s ides of Corona March, I want to reflect on what I see happening with respect to this terrible, terrible corona virus. If I offend in some of my views and/or come across as preaching, it is not my intention. If my words affect even one person to become what my wife calls a health crusader during this pandemic, then I will rejoice.

We live in an antibiotic culture. When sick, we want relief, instantly; we (over)rely on medicine to inoculate us, magically somehow, into health. An exaggeration? Perhaps. Isn’t most allopathic (western) medicine about ill-health; certainly health care is ill-health care. Health in North America, until very recently, was left to PE teachers to instill in students, woefully and inadequately trained as those teachers were. We take health ‘advice’ from magazines or well-meaning media journalists and/or charlatans who make unsubstantiated claims for magic products to ‘give’ us health, reduce our weight, have the same benefit as physical activity or a balanced, nutritious, regular diet (the latter equals what we eat, not a reducing diet).

When sick, we want medicine to fix us and fix us now. I remember one of my academic colleagues, a business school professor, now deceased, who used to say in jest, “if you get a cold, nurture it so that it devolves into pneumonia – they can treat that.” Of course he was referring to the resistance of a cold virus compared to pneumonia being a bacterial infection treatable by antibiotics. Sadly, we over-rely on and over-prescribe antibiotics and, in turn, bacteria are ‘learning’ and adapting and becoming more resistant to antibiotics.  Thus, there is a grain of truth to my colleague’s antibiotic quip with respect to our reliance on medicine to get us back to ‘health,’ whatever that is? Personally, I’ve always liked the Ottawa Charter‘s definition and the health implications of health promotion as “the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health.” Health in that definition is viewed as a resource for living everyday life, not as the goal of life. It also places a premium on ‘enabling’ people – individually, socially, and resourcefully to take ongoing responsibility for the health.

What if, as MD/psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel says (in his book, The Mindful Therapist):

Health in many ways can be seen as bathing in a wide open pool of possibility.

Unhealth, in his view is all the rigid and chaotic ways we become unable to be present with this broad freedom. I like the bathing analogy; we have huge freedoms here in Canada. We are at choice about almost all aspects of our health and well being ~ how and how well we eat, exercise, care for our emotional/spiritual/mental health etc etc. And sometimes, that freedom is taken from us as it is now with the corona virus with social restrictions and potential, looming lock-downs. Chaos and rigidity have reared themselves with reactions like the current well-known hoarding of toilet paper in anticipation that over the next few weeks, it will somehow be our greatest shortage. Cartoons have emerged and are held up to us to see ourselves as in this 4 horsemen of the apocalypse image:

Traditionally, the 4 riders are war, famine, pestilence, and death. How interesting that the 4th horseman, death carries toilet paper. And so we see people in our cities going way overboard in over-stocking supplies, not in moderation but in mega proportions. One couple in Vancouver, BC, a week ago, anticipating the need for disinfectant precautions, went to a variety of Costco stores and bought up all the Lysol disinfectant wipes they could find and then re-sold them on Amazon for 4 times the normal price. It has become difficult to get protective face masks as masses of people turn to their purchase and use to try to block the virus; turns out, the best thing about such face masks is not just the viral filtration but they also keep us from touching our mouths and noses as frequently as we are accustomed. As the epicentre of the virus shifted from China to Europe and very likely soon to move to the United States, the New Yorker magazine’s front cover satirized, sadly, President Donald Trump’s reaction with this cover:

The art work was done by Brian Stauffer and entitled, “Under Control,” spoofing Trump’s under-reaction to the virus threat a week ago. Humour, I predict, will grow as our viral situation escalates and that humour is important in dealing with this frightful pandemic. Already pundits are quipping that babies born 10 months from now will be labelled  the ‘coronial’ generation.

And I wonder how many of us look at the above Trump cartoon without seeing ourselves mirrored back to us? What blinders to our situation do we wear? In what ways to we ignore the obvious at our personal and collective peril? There is no cure, no needle, no antibiotic, no quick-fix to this deadly virus. The only way to control it – until a vaccine is created – from all evidence is to manage it; the only way to manage is to social distance ourselves. What does that mean? A few days ago, André Picard wrote a piece in the Toronto Globe and Mail, “Shut it Down: It’s time for Canada to get serious about social distancing” the article link is here . In the piece, the author advises us to manage the corona virus spread by limiting our social interactions and when we do have 2-person social interactions, to maintaining at least 2 metres physical distance between us. Fittingly, at the end, Picard quotes Canadian hockey legend, Wayne Gretzky’s advice, “skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.” The virus is here, in our towns and cities and we need to move our reactions toward managing our health. Picard advised closing schools, mass gatherings like sports in arenas/stadia. And we are heeding his advice more and more. In our evolving lingo of managing the virus, we have become attentive to the concept of “flattening the curve” …

As Picard noted in his article, it is critical that we take measures like social distancing, avoiding large crowds. And to those steps we and/or some countries have adopted quarantining, school/educational institution closings, closing restaurants, shutting down other institutions, businesses, and services. These are very tough decisions with huge financial and service implications. And, we must do them – all of these measures are social-physical distancing at the population level.

For me, from all the evidence presented to us, any meeting between two people, is, in reality, a mass gathering. Why? The chain of people with whom each of those two people has been in contact comes with the meeting of those two people. Which one of them travelled recently, to where, with whom were they in contact? Who did they touch; who touched them? What can and should each of us do to social distance ourselves and heed warnings like this Canadian woman now quarantined in Barcelona, Spain. Carmen Lee speaks to her situation on lock-down in that city (with heartfelt thanks to my niece for finding it and posting it). It’s long and well worth reading and taking to heart: