The COVID Three Step: Can We Please Just Do The Dance?

It’s time we learned to live with this virus.

With August barely in her grave, the aspen trees in Calgary took their first trembling steps into autumn, exchanging pleasant greenery for royal hues of gold and red. Fall was still officially three weeks in the future, but there was no time to waste — in this neck of the woods fall is but a colourful hiccup between the end of summer and the start of endless winter.

In lockstep with the quivering aspens, trembling parents — scared witless by the pandemic — sent their children back to school. Sixteen percent of Calgary parents were frightened away entirely, opting instead to enroll their kids in online learning.

To school or not to school? That was the burning question as August expired, an agonizing conundrum that produced heated debates and sleepless nights but no satisfactory answers.

And no wonder. Every day the apostles of the apocalypse and the disciples of denial (Team A and Team D, if you will — there can be no other team, it seems) scream incessantly at each other, their claims and quarrels amplified deliriously by media of all stripes and sources. It’s tough to maintain one’s sanity amidst the bedlam, let alone chart a sensible course forward.