Juno News - There's life outside of COVID-19

00:00:00.000 Months ago, I had a friend of mine living in the United States who told me that there,

00:00:09.140 the state that he was in, people are hardly even talking about COVID-19 anymore. And I thought,

00:00:14.180 what? Really? And this was when Ontario was still in severe lockdown. And I thought,

00:00:18.680 is it ever possible that such a situation could come to this province, could come to provinces

00:00:23.660 in Canada where people are just not really obsessing over COVID-19, all the nitty gritties,

00:00:29.120 day in, day out, glued to the TV screen, glued to the Twitter, looking at the numbers every single

00:00:34.840 hour? Could we get to that point? Well, it looks like we are getting to that point, finally, in

00:00:39.340 Canada. We've got Dr. Dina Henshaw in Alberta urging people to say, look, we got to get on with things.

00:00:45.140 Yes, COVID-19, got to take it seriously, want to minimize transmission of it, want to care for

00:00:50.120 people if they get ill, but we got to move forward here. British Columbia, Saskatchewan, other places

00:00:54.840 doing similar things. In Ontario, they're not quite there yet. Hopefully, they will get there soon.

00:00:59.980 But it's also interesting to see that a lot of people, I think, are finding during this summer

00:01:04.940 that, well, there's more to life than just obsessing over COVID. They're going on vacation,

00:01:09.580 they're taking a walk in the woods, as I'm obviously doing right now, and they're just

00:01:12.600 getting out, looking around, and doing more things. The world has opened up, no longer in lockdown. And

00:01:18.360 as you're able to do those different things, you're watching the kids playing sports outdoors,

00:01:23.160 you're getting out and about, you're going to the art gallery. I did that the other week. It was a good

00:01:28.320 experience. Just reminding that, oh yeah, there's actually more to life than stressing out about

00:01:33.820 where I'm standing, and where this person is headed, and so forth, and just kind of nitpicking

00:01:39.240 everybody for different COVID protocols that have been in place in the past, and generally just being

00:01:45.380 able to breathe again and experience life again. And as we move towards this being an endemic illness,

00:01:51.440 and as we move towards managing COVID-19, and as it hopefully recedes to the background, too,

00:01:56.880 as Dr. Dina Henshaw and others were saying, being one of many issues that the healthcare system does

00:02:02.060 have to manage pretty much, you know, throughout the year, that's going to see the mindset of regular

00:02:08.060 folks hopefully change. And we find ourselves sort of getting this mental vice grip that so many

00:02:14.420 people have had for the past year and a half, where it's all things COVID, all the time, all the little

00:02:18.920 minutiae of it. That's a thing that we're able to recede away from, and I think it's healthy for

00:02:23.860 everybody. It's good for people's mental health to no longer be that phrase I like to use, the COVID

00:02:29.340 busybodies who just can't let go of it, not only day to day, but really minute to minute. So I think

00:02:35.960 this summer has actually been good for people. There's even been medical authorities who, let's be

00:02:40.060 honest, they've been really busy the past year and a half. They're getting a week or two away. They're

00:02:43.660 going out and hanging out in the cottage and resuming some of those activities they love, and

00:02:47.760 everybody's just stepping back, and they're getting out of the nitty-gritty, and they're

00:02:51.620 looking back at the big picture again, and at the whole breadth of life and human experience. And

00:02:56.300 I think it's a good thing for Canadians, Ontarians, it's a good thing for humanity that we're really

00:03:01.760 learning to remember, hey, there are other things out there that we just gotta do, other things that

00:03:06.780 really make up the vibrancy of the human experience. So hopefully it's onwards and upwards.

Juno News - August 06, 2021