I’ve been resisting war similes, but I’ve started to feel that what’s going on in Canada these days is something like the Phoney War. That’s the eight-month period after England and its allies declared war on Hitler’s Germany in September, 1939, and nothing much happened. 

Nothing much in the context of what would happen. War plans were drawn up, France invaded German’s Saar Valley and retreated, a few planes were shot down, a British aircraft carrier was sunk, followed by a Royal Navy battleship, and Germany lost two destroyers to British mines. Altogether, about 2,000 died.

Germany finally invaded France in May, 1940, and the real war began. Until then, everyone had been holding their breath. 

Afterward, they didn’t let it out for five years.

I figure that we’re roughly at the breath-holding stage in Canada, despite the old-age home disasters. Basically, we’re waiting for the real shitstorm to begin. Nobody’s sure when or how it’s going to happen, and meanwhile we’re all following the conflicting medical and political news, trying to figure out what comes next. 

Maybe we’re going to see death tolls like northern Italy, New York or London, not during this first wave of infections, but maybe during a second wave, or a third. Maybe we’ll see outbreaks of violence, at first to the south, with gun-toting idiots being encouraged by their dangerous tweet of a president. And if the MAGAs really get going down there, God knows what idiocy is going to spill over the border into that unimpressive part of the electorate known as hard right.

There’s also the crises at two major slaughterhouses in Alberta, while farmers across the country are worried about getting enough labour to plant their crops. The food supply chain looks surprisingly fragile–and whoever used to say “food supply chain?”–meaning we could face worse shortages than flour and yeast. Maybe laid-off and furloughed workers will find themselves out of a job for a very long time. Everyone knows there’s a big chance of a historic new Depression. 

In the May 3^rd New York Times, columnist Frank Bruni interviewed journalist Laurie Garrett, who has been called the Cassandra of the current emergency, which she’s warned about for years. She says she sees the current “event” lasting for 36 months, “and that’s my best-case scenario.”

Garrett also sees society as being permanently changed by the virus, with people living far different lives after the plague recedes: living more locally and not travelling as much, even choosing to go to university close to home rather and heading out of town. She sees cities planning for more more bicycles and fewer cars, lots of people still working from home, and most meetings staying virtual, oh joy. 

“’Just as we come out of our holes and see what 25-per-cent unemployment looks like,’ she said. ‘we may also see what collective rage looks like.’”

Yet at the moment, most of us are doing okay in lockdown, even people on furlough from their jobs, knowing that we have free health care in Canada and a degree of government support. Everyone I know is anxious and distracted. Many are financially troubled, some are overwhelmed.

Most seriously, a friend who works for The Assaulted Women’s Helpline tells me that calls from abused women seeking emergency shelter and seniors calling their Seniors Safety Line in Ontario are up by 400 per cent over this time last year, with a 21 per cent increase in callers who simply can’t get through because the help phone lines are over capacity.

Still, if you need help yourself, here’s the link.

Yet as bad as it is, it’s worse elsewhere. Canada is losing more people than the islands, New Zealand and Taiwan, but comparatively few people have died here, meaning that not many of us have lost relatives and friends, at least so far. The weekend count showed that in a nation of 37 million people, 3,774 had died—about 1/10,000^th of the population.

In fact, I only know one person in Canada who’s lost a family member. His mother’s first cousin died in the troubled Sarnia nursing home. And my husband and I are in a position still rare among our friends of being close to someone who ended up in intensive care.

Our friend in England who was so sick with COVID went home last Thursday after more than a month in hospital. He’s the one who had a stroke caused by the virus, and he faces long-term physiotherapy. Someone less fit than him might not have made it. The stroke weakened his right side, although the pictures his wife sent us last week show him walking in the front door of their house after only two weeks in rehab. He has a new cane–sorry, walking stick–and looks about 30 pounds lighter, but at least he’s upright, and he’s told my husband that he can manage a few stairs.

More worrying are his vision problems. He can still see, but he says the world now looks flat, everything at a distance, and he can’t focus in. The screenwriter in me calls this a wide shot. He also says he can only read large type one word at a time. This means he can pick his way through newspaper headlines, but the text eludes him. 

He’s the one COVID casualty we know so far, although I’m also in contact with an elderly academic in England who very kindly helped me when I was researching one of the minor characters in my last novel, Mad Richard. We corresponded frequently back in 2016, but I hadn’t heard from him for a while when he surfaced a few weeks ago asking me to read a new monograph he’s written.

We went back and forth until he sent me an email last week that ends, “Hope you continue to be well? My nurse daughter is down with Covid-19 and I fear that my wife and I are likely to be infected sooner than later.”

Three days later, this arrived: “Did I tell you that both Ann (his wife) and I have developed the symptoms of a Covid-19 infection over the past few days, which have been most unpleasant. However we hope to survive. Our daughter’s swab proved positive, which must be the source of the virus. We are in STRICT isolation so thank goodness for emails!”

Yesterday: “I do apologise for the sloppy format of the references and now enclose a better version. I can only blame the coronavirus which has clouded my judgment! Still have some symptoms and so has Ann after nearly a week! Hope you have escaped?”

I’ve never met the man but I feel very badly getting his emails, and can’t help wondering how many more I’ll receive, and how many others like his will start arriving from people I know better. 

The playwright Brad Fraser sees the emergency through another prism. He’s been writing a series of extraordinary posts on social media based on his experience with the eruption of HIV and AIDS.

“This is how it works,” he writes, “and I remember this from a couple of plagues ago—first you read about the victims in the news, you hear about it happening in other places, then relatives of distant friends are lost, then the distant friends—people you just hear about—and then it’s someone known to a close friend, then it’s a close friend, then another close friend, someone in your family. You feel like you’re in the centre of a fire you can’t yet see or smell and then suddenly it is all around you and you have no idea if you’re going to get out alive. 

“I know this from experience. This is what will happen.”

So here we are, locked inside, the real war about to begin, the plague knocking on the door, the fire threatening.

Fraser adds, “Protect yourself. Stay indoors. Be relentless in cleaning and disinfection. The nice weather is tempting but there’s an encroaching fire and it is no longer so distant. Be smart and you’ll be able to write about it in the end.”