Every of the 1,000 native lives misplaced over the previous three years was any person’s liked one. Let’s mirror, and act to save lots of lives in future.
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Ottawa has now recorded its 1,000th official demise from COVID-19. In a metropolis of a couple of million, that represents one tenth of 1 per cent — statistically minute, it might appear.
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However the pandemic has by no means been a matter of straightforward statistics. Amongst those that succumbed to the sickness was certainly one of our former newsroom colleagues, Dave Dutton, who died within the spring of 2021 at The Ottawa Hospital. Though Citizen workers had been reporting on the virus for greater than a 12 months at that time, the demise of somebody we had as soon as labored with so intently was a devastating shock. Numbers be damned.
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Many Canadians have been hit with related bombshells. Whether or not associates or family members fell to the virus, or caught it and recovered, COVID touched everybody’s lives. Jobs have been reshaped — or misplaced; college days evaporated into home-based studying struggles; seniors confronted prison-like isolation in care amenities; social gatherings morphed into disjointed on-screen exchanges. Even these decided to disregard actuality and deal with COVID as “only a chilly” felt their lives shift.
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But Ottawa has been fortunate — comparatively talking. With out mitigating measures, that 1,000 would have been a a lot larger quantity. Right here, a better proportion of individuals than in lots of components of Canada are in a position to do business from home. Heaps have paid sick go away. A excessive proportion bought their preliminary vaccines and boosters, although we’ve got not achieved as effectively on our free, simply obtainable follow-up pictures. The town has good hospitals, together with the Kids’s Hospital of Jap Ontario, and splendidly devoted health-care employees.
We boast each science innovators — hey, Ottawa waste-water analysts! — and entrepreneurial adapters who took on the challenges of lockdowns and supply-chain gaps to maintain serving prospects. Our households re-learned “house economics” expertise, corresponding to cooking and baking, and we embraced outside actions, from city cross-country winter snowboarding to summer season mountain climbing and river swims.
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Future dangers, nevertheless, lie in our innate need to overlook unhealthy issues, a collective amnesia fuelled by Canada’s jittery political class. Well being care buckled beneath COVID; the economic system lurched. Individuals tuned out public well being messages and a few drank in misinformation, then regurgitated it on-line. Fears about private freedom rose to the boiling level, culminating within the downtown occupation final winter.
This metropolis’s bleak statistical milestone ought to immediate us all to mirror — and decide to motion. Begin with that vaccine booster. Perhaps dig out that unused masks, too. We don’t need one other 1,000 lives misplaced in Ottawa. We don’t need even one.
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