Have you noticed how the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is now known simply as AstraZeneca? I’m leery of mentioning COVID and my ongoing Queensland experience in this space yet again, but I will set aside my qualms and quibbles and speak to it because the pandemic is the most salient thing in my life and probably yours too. What I can’t get past is the split experience of watching Ontario unspool from afar while living in a place where there are no cases of community transmission and where life has resumed a flow and an energy that would be familiar to anyone who can recall the time before the virus. I miss friends and family, children especially, that I have not seen in 16 months and counting, and the province’s plight has become the most outsized fear in my life. The one question I can’t shake is, why has Queensland performed so much better than Ontario in its public health approach to pandemic control?
[IMAGE CAPTION: Catherine Dhavernas, Man with Mask, acrylic, 2021]