Skip to content

Be prepared — the tsunami wave is coming

Weyburn Review editorial

A tsunami of epic proportions has come, in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the daily updates from the federal and provincial governments are just hinting at how big the wave is.

The problem is, as with a physical tsunami wave, we don’t really know how big it is, or how powerful and all-consuming it is, until it actually sweeps over our shores and floods us.

The swelling numbers of infected people grows daily, and we have the examples of China and Italy to let us know how truly serious and deadly this virus is.

At the outset, there didn’t seem to be any real reason to be locking down for a virus that wasn’t here yet — but this didn’t take into account just how many people were out of the country, visiting other countries for work, a vacation or a family matter.

All of these people, including Snowbirds, are coming back into Canada as countries around the world wrestle with how to deal with the pandemic. To be safe, all of these people have to self-isolate for a two-week period to ensure they in fact didn’t bring COVID-19 back with them.

In order to try and “flatten the curve” of the number of people getting infected with this virus, stringent new conditions were imposed on Friday, and were added to on Monday by the provincial government, while the federal government has been clamping down on our border.

This is a major cost to all of the impacted businesses, but unfortunately it’s a move that has to be taken in order to limit people’s interactions and try and prevent infections.

The extent and impact of this virus is unprecedented, so really none of us know what the best course of action is to address it. Each area’s medical authorities and their governments are acting in the way they deem to be the best course of action.

Inevitably there will be armchair quarterbacks who think they can do it better, and there will be those who have 20/20 hindsight to point out everything we should have done but didn’t — but none of us know what the future will bring. None of us know the true extent of this tsunami wave until it crests and hits us.

The best that any of us can do is obey the restrictions and do the best we can. We don’t have a drug that can kill or suppress COVID-19 yet, we can only try and prevent people from catching it.

Even these measures are not going to be perfect, but until we know more about what we’re dealing with, this is the best approach, and all of us need to embrace it and try to get through this.