Rhino's Ramblings - The Return Of COVID - 19 version 2.0

By Robert Thomas Opinion/Commentary

For the past little while it has felt that we have been living on some sort of an island as COVID - 19 or rather the Variants Of Concern (VOC) have seemingly been rampaging across Regina and nothing has seemingly appeared in Moose Jaw.

Well that all changed this past week as VOCs finally started to show their ugly head making the city as notorious as the Queen City is when it comes to COVID - 19 in the province. The VOCs for the coronavirus properly known as SARS-CoV-2 have arrived.

No we have not hit the numbers Regina is seeing but given the growing prevalence of VOCs in the community and some of the attitudes out there in my opinion it can only be time until the Friendly City and the region around it finds itself in a partial or a full lockdown.

Some in the business crowd and the “freedom fighters” are not going to be happy with me saying this but the next week is going to be telling if the Province decides to enact a local or larger lockdown.

I will admit I had a bit of a gut feeling when I was at Council on Monday night just how some in Administration and on Council were acting that something was awry when it came to the pandemic. Call it my rhino-sense if you like but the change in mood at Council by some was more than noticeable.

It lead me on Tuesday morning to ask the only questions in the media scrum about the City’s efforts and what is going on when it comes to the COVID - 19 pandemic.

Questions that did dig out details that the City is monitoring the situation and using the threat of VOCs in the community to not re-open City Hall to their regular pre-pandemic hours.

The concerns I detected on Monday night at Council were further manifest by the province’s chief medical health officer Dr Saqab Shahab in the SHA’s Thursday afternoon press briefing where he specifically mentioned that local public health officials have been in contact with Moose Jaw City Council.

Although it might seem like something Council and the City should be doing - there also seems to be a bit of a communication’s breakdown between the City and the people that they serve over the past week.

It leaves me thinking, given the great changes in just a few days, did the City know more than what they are telling us? And if so what have they not been passing on to the general population and the big question is why?

The bleed over of cases from Regina to Moose Jaw was something Dr Shahab stated provincial health authorities had expected to happen given the distance between Regina and Moose Jaw.

People were just not taking the situation here seriously and now by all appearances the VOCs are here and after what seemed to be a solid month of no bad local news when it came to the pandemic things have seemingly exploded.

The school divisions have locally closed their doors early for Easter in the hopes of having some effect on the infection rate.

The thing they call “just a flu” is now a major threat to younger people. A flu that like SARS before it is doing more than taking lives but it is creating an entire class of what they call long haulers who have seen their lives change for months if not years and forever.

Now I am going to give you my personal experiences with a major virus. And no it is not COVID - 19 but it is most likely the flu I had back in 2019 or earlier.

I can tell you all about this one as I had it really, really bad and after I got over it - without hospitalization or medication - years later I started to feel worn down and sick.

Now was the virus still there? No it was long gone, but what a “simple flu” did to my body is something I am still fighting against years later.

The simple flu went after my internal organs - most notably my heart - and I can honestly tell you it is what has worn me down as what you could call the bottom or power end of my heart was attacked by a simple flu. My entire chest cavity seemed to be filling with fluids and it got so bad that I had to start sleeping upright in my recliner as I could not sleep and it literally felt like I was drowning.

It took a heart operation and now long-term medication just to get me so I can function and perhaps recover enough to take that one-way trip back to the Donbass.

This is what a “simple flu” or a virus can do to you.

But yet I see all kinds of people who view themselves as local heroes and without any medical reason decide to not wear masks as some sort of revolt against the man or the establishment I think.

Some of them have gone even further and they are true heroes as they take a crap at their favourite fast food restaurant and then don’t bother to wash their hands heading back out not just to eat but to shake the hands of their buddies. Totally gross heroics and a likely spreader of you know what.

The rules are so, so simple.

Just follow good hygiene, wear a mask indoors, keep your unclean hands away from your mouth and eyes and wash your bloody hands. Personally I believe if people did this perhaps this stupid flu, virus or pandemic would have been gone long ago.

It is similar to playing with matches as a child. You may get away with it for 998 times but then that one day you end up burning the neighbour’s shed down hoping like hell nobody saw you and therefore cannot blame it on you. When you play with fire, sooner or later you are going to get burnt or at least your neighbour is.

And that in a nutshell is where the situation rests right now.

The more virulent VOCs are here and the infection rate is starting to spike we are told because of it.

Oh I know there are those pro-freedom people running around town and saying the media is propagating a myth that the media is somehow licking all of this up and not questioning what is going on.

It is all part of some great vast conspiracy for the liberal elite, including key members of the media, to take control of the world.

That the freedoms we have worked so hard to achieve have been systematically stripped from us and the entire thing is going to continue whether it be COVID - 19 or the variants it is all part of some great grand plan of control.

Some have pointed out places like Belarus as the leadership there is taking advantage of the pandemic to enact measures to keep down the Opposition that by all measures won the presidential election.

I am sorry guys but I have seen no great crackdown on the Opposition here. People perhaps cannot congregate but you are predominantly free to believe what you want and express it.

Nobody is going to stop you from holding a rolling protest against the pandemic measures if you follow the rules of the road - that is unless you are in Belarus.

And for those of you who cannot wear a mask for legitimate medical reasons there is an exemption in the legislation.

An exemption where you can be asked to leave a store for not wearing a mask and then you can go ahead and file a complaint. That is if you have not already spoiled your chances of being successful by acting belligerently or aggressively when questioned about it. Believe me you are going to lose your complaint.

There has been other Human Rights cases that may have seemed like a slam dunk but when they finally hit the courts the courts came down on the side of safety.

Perhaps we need to just sit back and reflect for a few moments as to why would any of our local governments go along with such a great and grand conspiracy to destroy life as we know it?

We need to ask ourselves this question and then respond is there really some sort of conspiracy going on.

Does it really make sense for a pro-business government such as the SaskParty to enact measures that are not only destroying small and local but regional businesses as well? What would be the point in all of it?

Given the business crowd is seen as friendly territory for the SaskParty why would they go out of their way to be part of some grand scheme that destroys the livelihoods of their key supporters?

If you really think about it, it really does not make a lot of sense now or does it?

Once you think about this for a majority of people the key answers are going to be that there really is a virus and for some reason it scares the hell out of the people at the top.

For myself I am going to take a simplistic view about all of it.

I am going to think about my childhood and how in those days Moose Jaw use to close their stores by law on Wednesday afternoons and Thursday nights we could shop until 9 pm. All of these extra hours of shopping and going out for me are really just conveniences if I look back at the not so distant past.

We never use to go shopping twice a week, it was once a week and that was it.

Going out for coffee or a restaurant was at best a once a week luxury unlike today when it is a daily sense of entitlement for many of us.

Or are we so entitled (or is dependent) we need to go out and be with other people so we can sit there and text or post to Instagram? The days of communicating by voice are in many ways dead when you truly think about the digital world we live in.

And how many of us remember ordering lots of stuff from home and then having it delivered?

Can we not live off of takeout and delivery like we use to do in the past?

Now I am not a medical specialist, I am not an epidemiologist or some virologist, but I have chatted with a few since the rise of this pandemic and their response is the situation is not a good one but we are much better off than most people in this world.

We live in what we can call the Western World and access to clean potable water and the disinfectants necessary to keep this virus away from us is within our grasp. If you take a look at it access to clean potable water is for most of us easy and relatively cheap despite the rising costs on our local water bills.

Vaccines, despite supply chain problems, are on their way and we are getting access to them far faster than many places in the undeveloped world.

Perhaps just by following a few and simple rules we can have better lives in this effin’ pandemic without the constant need to be at each others throats but then again maybe the virus, which has no brain, has already figured us out as a species and mutated to take advantage of it.