Women of the Pandemic

by Lauren McKeon

  If Canada wanted not simply to recover what’s been lost but to ensure well-being for decades to come, argued the report’s authors, it needed to learn from the pandemic. After all, the recession itself was unlike anything the country had ever seen before; the solution needed to be equally ground-shaking. First, the joint plan outlined, the government would need to adopt an intersectional framework. To do so, it needed an unflinching account of the pandemic’s consequences across race, age, gender identity, gender expression, disability, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, and immigration status—something that, nearly a year into the pandemic, it had not yet done. Second, after it had gathered better, more equitable data, it needed to follow that data and address the root cause of systemic racism. For instance, only $305 million, or less than 1 per cent of the federal government’s COVID-19 funding, went to Indigenous communities; new economic stimulus couldn’t follow the same flawed path. Jointly, it needed to address things like paid sick leave, safe housing, and other social determinants of health—and it would have to listen to the affected communities to figure out how to fix them. Third, the federal government needed to recognize that care work—both paid and unpaid—is essential, and then begin treating it as such. Meaning, better pay, more support, benefits, and better conditions. Meaning, universal child care.

  Next up is investing in “good jobs” for people who don’t traditionally have them: people of colour, trans people, the disabled. A “good job,” added the authors, doesn’t mean whatever stereotypical, classist thing you think it does; it means anything that is stable and provides a livable income. Fifth, the government would need to fight what’s been dubbed the “shadow pandemic”—that is, the enormous rise in hate and violence, including, but definitely not limited to, domestic violence. As the recovery report noted, one in five Indigenous women told the Native Women’s Association of Canada that they have experienced physical or psychological violence since the start of the pandemic. Chantel Moore, an Indigenous woman living in New Brunswick, and Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a Black-Indigenous woman living in Toronto, were killed during police wellness checks that took place during the first wave. And in June, the Vancouver Police Department said there had been a 600 per cent increase in reports of hate crimes against Asian communities. Prosperity shouldn’t thrive in hate and violence, stressed the authors. Sixth, any recovery plan must also centre small businesses as well as business owners in underrepresented groups—like Alèthe Kaboré and Sarah Taher. Both of these categories represent significantly untapped economic potential. Seventh, the government must provide the infrastructure to make it all happen: housing, clean water, broadband access. The new economy won’t succeed if people can’t access the foundations. Lastly, wrote the authors, any decision-making must include diverse voices. “To ensure an equitable recovery,” stressed the report, “we need to shift whose knowledge is valued in the conversation.”

  It’s an ambitious plan, but the women of the pandemic have already provided the blueprint. Their work has shown us the way forward—and it’s exposed the unconscionable pitfalls we must avoid as we move past COVID-19. This book has never been about perfection. The women you’ve met have revealed astonishing strength, and they’ve suffered immeasurable loss. They’ve made their own mistakes, and they’ve borne the brunt of others’. But what they all have in common is that, during the worst time in contemporary society, they tried. They tried to connect us. They tried to keep us safe. They tried to look out for each other. They tried to keep us healthy. To take care of us. To create this better world that we’re dreaming of now. They tried simply to keep going. As we think about how we made it through, and how we’ll keep making it through, and what recovery looks like, we owe it to them to remember how their actions carried us. We owe it to them, and to each other, to try something new.

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  When we think back to this time, we’ll all have stories about how we coped. The bread we made, the puppies we brought home, the people we loved. We will have stories of how we connected and how we fell apart. And we’ll have stories about the women in our own lives who kept us going—the women who didn’t make headlines or books, but who checked in on us, who made us laugh, who were there when we cried. They made the isolation and the fear and the grief a little easier to bear. You know these women. They’re your best friends, your neighbours, your partners, your mothers and grandmothers and sisters and aunts. They are your teachers and coaches. You are these women. You’re the mom who hugged your shaking daughter after a nightmare about a world ending, who tried to remember integers and prime numbers and square roots, who worked hours into the night so your kids wouldn’t be lonely in the sun. You’re the friend who dropped off chocolate-stuffed care packages, who organized wine night on Zoom, who always picked up the phone. You’re the one who volunteered your time, freely gave your support, did the best you could. You’re the one who tried.

  I know these women, too. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was invited to join a virtual card night with my aunt and two of her friends. We started with euchre, and when one week piled on into one month, then two, we switched to another game, at random, called 500—I’m not going to explain the rules, or the game itself, because I’m still not entirely sure what they are. We played one round after another, making mistakes and glorious gambles, always agreeing to “just one more,” long past regular weeknight bedtimes, through yawns and bad plays and friendly taunts. We played to stay connected and grounded, and I’m not being hyperbolic when I say these women kept me sane. They were not the only ones. For months, my friends were there, unwavering, in group chats and on the phone. We were there for each other when loneliness and instability clawed at us, through lost jobs and struggling kids, through the anxieties of working from home and the anxieties of returning to work. We shared cat photos and photos of our newest sweatsuits, swapped recipes and face mask tips. We lifted each other up. We taught each other how to use Zoom. We tried socially distanced barbecues and felt the bittersweetness of reunion without touch, embrace, or even a simple high five.

  For months, I spoke to my mother nearly every day from my home in Toronto. My sister, who’s in her twenties and is intellectually disabled, lives with her in B.C. They’d gather on Zoom, always half out of the frame, a photo of my teenaged face and bad hair staring at me from the wall behind them. We would talk about the strangeness of the world, and my sister would gather new items for show and tell. She showed me the rock pets she made, decorated with colourful googly eyes and glitter paint that washed off in the valley mist, and I showed her my rock-like attempts at baking gluten-free bread, each batch rising slight centimetres higher. We rated her new scented Crayola markers, and even though I couldn’t smell them, we both knew the pizza one was gross. I dragged my seventeen-year-old cat on camera, which he curmudgeonly allowed for brief seconds. My mom started making her own bath and beauty products during the quarantine, eventually customizing lavender-and-bergamot shampoo, lotion, face wash, and even perfume for me, which she’d send in hulking care packages. We celebrated Mother’s Day, my sister’s birthday, and my own birthday in this way, over Zoom, willing our love to seep through the screen, carried in sound waves and pixels.

  Through all this love, we also helped each other bear loss. As some businesses and community centres opened, others didn’t make it. For many heartbreaking weekends in a row, I helped tear down my historic boxing club. We sold all the equipment—the heavy bags and the speed bags and the weights and medicine balls—that helped me make it through the toughest times in my life. Piece by piece, we dismantled the place where I, and countless others, learned how to be strong. We categorized history into boxes and took it all to a storage locker, hoping, praying, vowing that one day we would take it all out again. We sat with our coach for hours, listening to her stories of how she built this special place, witnessing our grief, watching the biggest dragonfly we’d all ever seen flit through our increasingly empty
gym and telling each other that, yes, it was a symbol of new beginnings. We cried. And, together, we gathered—the current crew of boxers and the many people who had, over the decades, also found something special in that special place—and we painted over our logo on the wall, returning it to its original state. Then, we rallied in the park to keep on training, masks on, socially distanced but connected, sweating in the blistering summer sun and then the cool fall breeze. There, we taught ourselves the meaning of resilience and community and strength all over again.

  This book cannot capture the stories of every woman who’s making a difference during the pandemic, of every woman who has suffered a loss. This pandemic is ongoing, and its effects will stretch further still. The tally, on both fronts, is ongoing. This book also can’t correct every history text that tells the story of human accomplishment and suffering through the eyes of men, too often reducing women to a footnote or an exception or nothing at all. It cannot recover those lost narratives, that particular grief. What I hope, though, is that this book has helped to capture an extraordinary moment in time, and the women who defined it. Their stories, their actions, and their voices matter. When we remember this time, and all that we have lost, we will not lose them, too. They were here. We were here.

  Epilogue

  Throughout the course of the pandemic, I’ve heard many variations of the same joke-but-not-a-joke: time is broken. There is so much happening, all at once, that every day feels like it’s been stuffed with a whole year’s worth of events—kind of like a pandemic olive. But also nothing is happening. What even are days of the week? Does it matter if it’s a Tuesday or a Saturday? Days blend into each other, mixed by loneliness, exhaustion, isolation, loss. While writing Women of the Pandemic, I felt that time-bending keenly. Throughout the summer, as I interviewed dozens of women, it looked like Canada was flattening the curve. Empty streets filled. People appeared on patios, suddenly, as if by teleportation, laughing and drinking cold beers, chilled wine. We flocked to malls, gyms, weddings, potlucks, baseball diamonds, and soccer fields. With trepidation we planned for school, transforming classrooms and prepping remote learning. Public health measures softened, allowing openings and larger crowds. Our own rule-following slid, too. Maybe we were in denial, wrapped in dangerous conspiracies and twinning beliefs that the virus wouldn’t touch us, that it wasn’t that bad. Maybe we thought we were invincible. Maybe we simply missed our families, our friends, our regular lives.

  Multiple infectious disease experts had told me that, in the entire history of pandemics, there had never been one that escaped the second wave. I knew this from researching disease across the centuries. The bubonic plague, cholera, the so-called Spanish flu, H1N1, SARS, and so on. Call it a wave or a phase or an unfortunate comeback, most disease outbreaks returned, ebbing and then crashing, seemingly disappearing and then reappearing elsewhere like a sneezing Houdini. Still, at one point this summer, I began to hope that by the time this book was published the pandemic would essentially be over in Canada. That wilfully naive hope bubbled into the fall, until reality popped it on September 28. That day, Ontario, my home province, recorded the highest number of new COVID-19 cases in a single day since the beginning of the pandemic, hitting seven hundred. It would go on to break that record a few days after that, and would break the new record a few days after that. On October 25, it reported more than one thousand cases in a single day. Around that time, Canada itself passed a grim milestone of two hundred thousand total cases, and our increasing daily count prompted the European Union to remove us from its “white list” of countries from which travellers can visit unrestricted. By the end of the month, the virus had killed over ten thousand people in Canada. People cancelled Thanksgiving plans, then Halloween trick-or-treating. Winter holidays seemed up in the air, and even Trudeau suggested Christmas might be cancelled. And, of course, weeks later, it was.

  As I write this, in the first days of 2021, nearing ten months into the pandemic, I can honestly say I have no idea what state the world will be in when Women of the Pandemic is published. By the time we rung in the new year, a total of about 85.1 million people, worldwide, had contracted the virus. Roughly 47.8 million of them had recovered, and 1.84 million of them had died. In Canada, cases among twentysomethings have surged, surpassing the number of cases of those in the eighty-plus age range near the end of August. A month before that, a globally focused study revealed that COVID-19 affected more middle-aged people than initially assumed. In England, it found, a person aged fifty-five to sixty-four “who gets infected with SARS-CoV-2 faces a fatality risk that is more than 200 times higher than the annual risk of dying in a fatal car accident.” Meanwhile, back home, many provinces seemed hesitant to reinstate lockdown measures, and moved slowly. One day before Halloween, more than a dozen doctors in Manitoba published a letter urging the government to once more shut down the province. “We’re well past the stage where even a robust community response will significantly slow the epidemic,” they wrote in the Winnipeg Free Press. “Fortunately, your government has already shown us what needs to be done.” Perhaps unfortunately, however, few seemed to want to do it all over again—even as many doctors warned of an overloaded system. Bonnie Henry advised a press conference at the end of October, “We are in the danger zone and we need to take the action to make it okay,” but added that a renewed lockdown wouldn’t be one of the measures.

  By mid-November, Henry had changed her mind. On the nineteenth, the province entered a social lockdown, once again suspending events and social gatherings. Bars and restaurants were allowed to remain open (although not for New Year’s Eve celebrations). A beleaguered Manitoba enacted even stricter measures that same month, largely closing everything but schools and daycare. Restaurants once more moved to take-out only, and retailers to online shopping and curbside pick-up. My home province, Ontario, waited longer to rewind time, first issuing a renewed and adjusted lockdown in hotspots, like Toronto, before eventually extending the orders provincewide on December 26. As emergency room doctor Kanna Vela said when I spoke to her again that month, the rising case counts that sparked all those closures had renewed the sense of fear for many frontline workers: “It’s fear we won’t beat this thing, fear more people will continue to die, fear we will run out of hospital beds and ventilators—something that is actually happening right now.” She felt immense guilt, too, every day wondering if she’d bring the virus home to her family. But she also felt pride and obligation and a sense of privilege that, as the second wave crushed Canada, she was able to help many people who were at their most vulnerable.

  After close to a year spent talking to essential workers and women on the front line, to those who’ve lost their livelihoods and their well-being, it was hard not to feel dismayed, and even a little angry, as I watched our case count steadily slope upwards in the final months of 2020. There is a reason the term doomscrolling seems so apt—we can’t stop reading the news, even though we know it’s depressing, disheartening, and just plain bad. I can see why some would want to turn away. I have, by now, spent months immersing myself in COVID-19 news, and the knowledge can be suffocating. No matter your vantage point, watching the pandemic unfold can often feel like riding a looping rollercoaster that’s also screeching toward a cliff. The problem, of course, is that even if we safely parachute off the world’s least fun ride, it’s still going to crash over the edge. And there is a stark difference between understandably shutting our eyes for a few moments and pretending there is nothing to be afraid of at all. Dampening the second wave is our collective governments’ responsibility, but let’s face it, it’s also ours.

  If the end of 2020 saw overwhelming case counts and the terrifying emergence of a new, more contagious strain, it also saw hope. Canada approved and bought two vaccines in December, with the rollout beginning that same month. Still, as we know, that rollout is far from instantaneous—or easy. Each province and territory has planned out its own phases, deciding who gets their s
hot in the arm when. It’s likely the general public won’t all get their shots until the end of September 2021, and that’s if the rollout goes smoothly in each jurisdiction. Until then, we have another long slog ahead of us as we try to keep everyone safe from COVID-19.

  Somewhere in the past, we were promised flying cars and jetpacks, and instead we got a pandemic that fractured the world. Many people have described 2020 as the worst year ever. I get it. I have, too. Unfortunately, the start of 2021 hasn’t given us a blank slate. Even as we have a sense of renewed hope, the virus is still very much here and it can still feel like everything is out of our control. But that isn’t entirely true: we can control how we move forward. We can control how we rebuild.

  Memory is an unreliable thing. We can often erase or minimize problems with which we don’t want to grapple. In this manner, we’ve allowed the measles and other preventable diseases to return. We were surprised at how strikingly similar the 1918 flu pandemic was to today’s pandemic, both in its global sweep and in the way that strong public health measures had the ability to strike it down. When we recover from any illness, pandemic-wrought or not, we may even let our sense of how bad it was, how violently sick we were, fade. When the H1N1 pandemic struck, I was working as a reporter in Iqaluit, Nunavut, where people were especially hard-hit by the virus. I got it, too, and my cough became so chronic, and so vicious, that I eventually began to hack up blood—a side effect that lingered for weeks. I didn’t think about it much in the intervening years. As for forgetting, you might think that’s fairly harmless. But it can become dangerous in its own way. Say, the way much of colonial Canada dismissed—and didn’t learn from—the H1N1 pandemic because Indigenous, Northern, and remote communities bore the brunt of the outbreak. Or the ways in which too little change took place to prevent healthcare workers from getting sick, or suffering from the mental health fallout, post-SARS. How, on a wider scale, we didn’t heed the many warnings from virologists and other experts that, if things didn’t change, the next big pandemic would be a zoonotic one; that we should prepare for it. (As COVID-19 proved, many countries didn’t.) These are the ways in which our dominant culture rewrites, or steamrolls over, other narratives. These are the ways in which we practise our own forgetting. It isn’t always malicious, but it is usually unwise.