The good news in all of this is that after Quebec’s last turn of the screw, we shouldn’t need too much of a curfew …
Almost everything is closing until further notice: bars, taverns, casinos, cinemas, theaters, gyms, spas. Only restaurants are spared, but they have to kick their customers out at 10 p.m.
It doesn’t give much reason to hang out at night. You might as well indulge in extreme cocooning while waiting for it to pass.
I sound like I’m kidding, like that. But it is very serious. Four days before Christmas, the situation is critical.
Cases are exploding. Hospitalizations are on the rise. Intensive care admissions, too. All the lights are red.
“We are 8 million in Quebec. And we are at war. It is the war at the moment against the virus, warned the Minister of Health, Christian Dubé.
He did not rule out that Christmas Eve at 10 may go by the wayside. “We take one day at a time. It’s so bad, what’s happening. ”
For Christmas, between you and me, it looks like the carrots are cooked …
I didn’t want to write this column. For a long time, I resisted.
A few weeks ago, I was enthusiastically preparing a report abroad. That day, my boss told me not to rely on it too much.
Not that it didn’t interest him, or that we didn’t have the budgets, but there was this new variant that had just appeared on radar screens in Africa. A variant with an unlikely name, a villain name in a superhero movie. Omicron.
I didn’t want to hear it. My (almost) normal life had finally resumed its course. I had just raided hard laundry. I had seen the colleagues in the office again. I was going to go back to the field. Report elsewhere, on something other than COVID-19, finally. I was already thinking about the holidays.
I was sinking into denial, one Christmas gift purchase at a time.
I especially did not want to rewrite my column for December 2020. Its title: “Cancel Christmas”.
But I have to face the facts. I can no longer close my eyes or continue to cover my ears.
Let’s cancel Christmas, once again.
This desperate feeling of standing still. To experience Groundhog Day over and over and over again.
What was I writing, on this date, last year?
“It looks bad. Hospitals are starting to crumble under the pressure. The cases are increasing. The dead too. Exhausted, healthcare workers are dropping like flies. ”
A year later, there are fewer hospitalizations – for now. But the caregivers are even more exhausted. The network, even closer to the abyss.
I also wrote that we did not have to wait for the Prime Minister to tell us to put the Christmas holidays aside. Did Papa Legault absolutely have to forbid us to gather around the turkey with the atocas to realize that this was not the idea of the century?
The same question arises today. Exactly the same.
Finally, I wrote that the famous “moral contract” proposed by the government, it was with ourselves that it had to be negotiated. With our own conscience. Twelve months later, that hasn’t changed.
Because we may be tired-tanned-sickened, we may burn with the desire to take a break, we remain in a pandemic. And, like in December 2020, no one wants the next family reunion to take place at the cemetery.
In a burst of optimism that now seems very naive to me, I also wrote, a year ago, that it would be the only ugly Christmas before the arrival of the vaccine. The only Christmas sacrificed for the cause.
I was wrong. The vaccine has arrived, but a second Christmas has to be canceled. Or at least revise our plans downwards.
I was in the field, but this is no longer the time to be proud, as François Legault would say. We have been told from the start: this virus is unpredictable. He mutates. The beast changes, and our antibodies no longer recognize it.
It is against this deadly virus that we must concentrate our energies. Not against Horacio Arruda, who has become the deadpan of an exhausted people, nor against François Legault, who asks us for a truce.
This is no longer the time to argue. Our government, like just about every government on the planet, was taken aback by Omicron’s meteoric attack.
The villain of the superhero movie had a secret power: he was mega-hyper-contagious.
We hadn’t seen it coming. At least not with so much force. But he is with us now. It is about to wreak havoc. There is no point in blaming the leaders. Finally, do it if it gets you off steam, but follow the sanitary instructions. We won’t get out of it otherwise.
I know, I repeat myself. I despair of having to rewrite the same column once again.
But this is no longer the time to be in denial.