Editor:
I find myself very perplexed with many of the issues we are faced with in the last year, and into the foreseeable future.
Last March, April and most of May, myself and many others across Canada were not legally allowed to work. At this time, there was little to no COVID-19 cases in the Cariboo-Chilcotin.
Now, if you have lived in this area for any length of time, you will know that most things like hairstyles and fashion trends take a while to get here, but soon enough, they arrive. COVID-19 is much the same.
It took almost a year, but the pandemic is now here in the Cariboo-Chilcotin.
So, at a time (spring and into summer of 2020) when our communities did not need to be locked down, when businesses did not need to be closed, when schools did not need to be shut down, they were.
Employees sanitized buggies and constantly wiped surfaces, and counted the amount of people allowed into stores. There were lineups to get into grocery stores.
READ MORE: Interior Health declares Cariboo Chilcotin region a COVID-19 cluster, 215 cases since Jan. 1
There was a letter from all the doctors in Williams Lake on the front page of our local paper, pleading for people to stay home. Drive-by birthday parties were the norm, and pots and pans clanged at 7 p.m. for front line and essential workers nightly.
Fast forward nine months: like a pregnancy COVID-19 is here, in our town, in our communities, here in the Cariboo-Chilcotin, here to the point the amount of cases is so high it’s been declared a “cluster.”
There are no lineups at grocery stores, the maximum amounts of people permitted in stores is 58 per cent higher (one example was 70, now 120) now than it was last spring.
The only place I have seen or heard tell of anyone counting patrons is the liquour store. I haven’t seen a sterilized buggy since I don’t know when. Aside from all the small, local businesses that went under as a result of “lock down,” it seems to be business as usual.
Children are attending school (yet church isn’t permitted), but due to the amounts of positive cases and potential exposures, entire classes of students seem to be on a merry-go-round of sorts taking turns being required to self isolate.
The only time I hear pots and pans clanging is when I’m doing dishes.
All of these types of things really drives it home. Common sense really isn’t a flower that grows in everyone’s garden.
It seems to me a shame that nobody with the authority to do anything will do so at a time when we seem to need it the most.
The Spanish flu lasted from February 1918 to April 1920.
I would have thought that we as human beings would have learned more from our ancestors 100 years ago.
Tammy-Lee Isnardy
Williams Lake
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