‘Drop everything’: Looking back at the week COVID-19 changed everything in B.C.

Two years ago this week I received a phone call that immediately brought into sharp focus the extraordinary journey we were all about to set out on.

It was from Health Minister Adrian Dix, who told me: “Everything I have worked for is about to disappear. We are going to cancel all non-urgent surgeries.”

That news was, to say the least, jarring and almost mind-numbing. The World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 a global pandemic just a few days before, but at that time, B.C. was only detecting a couple of dozen positive cases each day, although the number was growing.

In mid-March of 2020 the pandemic still seemed to be a remote phenomenon taking place in countries far away. So cancelling (or not booking) more than 32,000 surgeries brought the pandemic home in a big way and showed the gravity of the situation.

3:07 End of COVID-19 restrictions causing anxiety for some

Of course, COVID-19 never did overwhelm our health care system — a fear which led to the mass surgery cancellation in the first place. What was happening in places like northern Italy had health officials here extremely concerned.

Still, things did indeed begin to deteriorate, as daily cases started ballooning in number, as did hospitalizations, ICU patients and deaths.

Shortly after hearing Dix’s news, I sat down and wrote a memo to our Global BC assignment desk.

“Drop everything,” I wrote back then. I explained that COVID-19 was going to take over the news cycle like nothing we had remotely experienced. We would be doing COVID stories on so many fronts and we would be doing many of them over and over again.

“This will go on for at least a year, probably two and perhaps even three or longer,” I concluded.

Unfortunately, I was proven correct. We are into our third year of the pandemic, although it seems we are now closer to the end of it than the beginning.

2:13 COVID-19: Provincial mask mandate no longer in effect in B.C.

Personally, I decided to take a deep dive into covering the pandemic right from the start, even before Dix’s phone call. On my desk today sits a pile of more than a dozen steno notebooks, all of them a daily diary of COVID-19 statistics and data. Nearby are dozens of spread sheets, each of them documenting the rise and fall of positive cases, deaths and hospitalizations on a regional basis.

We have been through various psychological stages over the past two years. We have gone from bewilderment and fear to acceptance and grim determination to get through this difficult time.

We have, for the most part, embraced new kinds of behaviour designed to keep us safe. With the vast majority of us fully vaccinated, it seems there is a collective view that it is time to move on from where we have been for more than two years.

However, the pandemic is not over. As I write this, China is reporting its worst COVID-19 outbreak in two years. Last week, 39 people in B.C. died from, or with, COVID-19 and almost 450 people in hospital tested positive for the virus.

Of course, we are trending in the right direction and hospitalizations and ICU cases continue to decline. The mask mandate has been lifted and the vaccine cards needed to to access certain places will be removed in less than a month.

But we are still on that extraordinary journey. We may be ready to leave COVID-19 behind, but it is not completely done with us yet.

Keith Baldrey is chief political reporter for Global BC.