What a long, strange trip it’s been, to quote the old song.
Back in March 2020, most of us were probably expecting a brief interruption — a few weeks at most — to our lives.
Needless to say, that’s not how it played out. It’s been more than two years of cancellations, delays and shelved dreams.
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On a personal note, my siblings and parents had a family vacation planned to sunny climes less than two weeks after the world as we knew it came to an end. It didn’t happen, and it’s not clear when we’ll have the opportunity again.
But that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been progress. Economists often talk of metaphorical ‘green shoots’ that appear after a recession has raged. They’re the first halting signs that the economy has survived and turned a corner to recovery.
Similar signs are beginning to appear, as you can see in the pages of this issue, for the resumption of more normal lives.
In our FarmIt section, Alexis Stockford talks to rodeo and fair organizers about the welcome return of these community events to rural Manitoba. And on page three, Don Norman gives a preview of upcoming field days at the provincial crop diversification centres. As I write this editorial, he’s attending the first in-person Manitoba Crop Diagnostic School in more than two years.
Then, of course, there’s Glacier FarmMedia (the parent company of this publication) and its Ag In Motion show at Langham, Sask., just north of Saskatoon. As you can read in our latest issue of the Co-operator, it’s set to go July 19 to 21 for the first time since the pandemic.
After a long and gruelling stretch, this is a most welcome change to most of us. A few stars have aligned to see this change come.
First, there’s the rapid and near total uptake of immunization in Canada. In the end roughly 90 per cent of eligible Manitobans rolled up their sleeves and got the first two doses.
You can quibble that uptake for boosters is lower, but the important take-home message appears to be that, while vaccinations haven’t prevented illness from newer variants, health care providers say they’ve dramatically reduced the worst outcomes.
Then there’s the nature of the newer variants. Having had the omicron variant myself (admittedly this is presumed by my doctor, who told me it was responsible for virtually all cases) I can say it was a bad cold/flu-like illness. But it was only on par with the worst of those kinds of illnesses I’ve had in the past.
What appears to be happening is something medically smart folks call ‘attenuation.’ In simple terms, the biological interest of a virus is to survive and thrive. To do that it needs a host – in this case you or me. If it’s too virulent, it kills the available hosts, thus depriving itself of hosts.
The omicron variant appears to be the first step in that pattern. It’s been seen in the past.
The Spanish flu, which caused the 1919 pandemic, is still with us today, albeit at low levels. It apparently circulated widely well into the 1920s in increasingly less virulent waves.
Likewise, there’s the so-called Russian flu, which emerged in that country in 1889 and spread across the globe in three known waves. Some researchers now think it was another coronavirus that eventually attenuated into just another complex virus that causes the illnesses we have lumped together in the basked of the ‘common cold.’
As this process occurs, there could no doubt be setbacks, but it seems the trend is thankfully heading in the expected direction, and hopefully future variants will follow this well-trodden path.
In the meantime, most of us are pleased with the return of these in-person events. We are social beings, after all, and we best thrive when we’re in the agreeable company of others.
We will all calculate our own risk tolerances as life comes back to normal.
I’m personally very excited about the upcoming field days and farm shows. It’ll be great to see familiar faces and meet a few new friends, as I always do when I leave the computer for a while.
I’m not personally champing at the bit to get onto an airplane full of strangers and recycled air — and that’s despite reassurances from a pilot friend who says the cabin air is likely cleaner than the air in the terminal.
And I’ll still do what I can to protect the health of older and more vulnerable friends and family.
But in the meantime, I’m ready to get on with life, and that includes seeing people in person.
I’m looking at my calendar and trying to figure out which on the menu of farm events I’ll be able to attend this summer.
