Five long years - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

With Donald Trump putting so much time and effort into ruining things in real time, there, perhaps, wasn’t any ink leftover to mark the five-year anniversary of something else that ruined everything. In March of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic took hold of the world and wouldn’t let it go for several years. Now, here, five years later, the world feels like a very different place than it did in those months before the pandemic.

 

On March 11, 2020, Jess and I took the day off work and travelled to Toronto. We had a nice dinner and then headed to George Brown College for a talk by Irish chef and champion of Irish cuisine J.P. McMahon. He released The Irish Cookbook and was there to promote it, sign copies of it and talk all about Irish food, all while George Brown students prepared some of the dishes contained within the book for attendees to enjoy throughout the night. 

 

I was in Toronto during the SARS outbreak, so that was my closest frame of reference, but, for the most part, and with Jess expecting our first child, we were flying by the seats of our pants after mutually deciding to go, even as word of cases of the virus multiplying around the world had reached our ears. On the train, there was a woman across the aisle from us wearing a mask and that freaked us out. Little did I know that she was being conscientious and that, soon enough, we’d all be wearing them. Then, in the theatre, some people were coughing and hacking around us and, frankly, we paid a little more attention to it than we may have had in our pre-COVID lives. 

 

(This is perhaps a good time to remind you all that Jess and I, expecting a child, took all of this very seriously - and for longer than most, so, if you have e-mails you want to send about vaccines, masks, the pandemic itself or the globalist agenda, please send them to me at editof@northuron.com - my purposely mis-spelled e-mail address because I can’t imagine an e-mail I want to read less than yours.)

 

Aside from sanitizing our hands a lot more than usual (I really used to hate the stuff and have, on more than one occasion, accused Jess of being a bit much in regards to germs), we largely went about our business. Then, the next day, everything changed. Sports leagues began cancelling entire seasons, bands nixed tours and the world, as we knew it, was gone.

 

Now, most of us lived. Many did not, but to say that the world is “back to normal” in a way we would recognize before 2020 would be false. Much has changed, for better and for worse, and it seems foolish not to recognize that anniversary. So much was unknown at the time and, whether people wanted to accept it or not, some prognosticators were suggesting that a return to a world we’d consider normal would be years away and that millions of lives could be lost on the way to that new normal. 

 

I was just e-mailing with a friend today. He and his wife were to dine with Jess and me in Stratford on March 14, 2020 - a Saturday. We cancelled, as a result of all that was becoming known between our trip to Toronto on March 11 and March 14, but I assured him that we would have many, many other opportunities to do it again, perhaps even in a few weeks’ time as everyone did their part to *flatten the curve* as politicians and scientists told us repeatedly. 

 

Well, that dinner never did happen and my friend and his wife have since moved from Stratford to Toronto. I have seen him since, but you think of all that was lost in those early months and years... the pandemic is truly a case of time feeling at once lightning fast and as slow as molasses. And yet, somehow, here we are five years later, all of it behind us.