This week, Aaron has chosen the word crisis for our writing inspiration.

We seem to be fast approaching another crisis in Ontario around Covid. We had pretty great numbers in August and September, really great actually. But now the second wave is upon us and it’s starting to get bad.

During the first wave, our highest recorded numbers were in the high hundreds. Daily totals of like 600 I think? Now our new daily numbers are pushing into the 1000’s. They are predicting that if we don’t change our ways soon, that in December we could be hitting the 6,000s DAILY CASES.

HOW INSANE IS THAT!?

That’s like Florida back in April and May. I’m sorry to those living in Florida, but those hot spots were INSANE just because people wanted to go to the bar? Please. SMH

Anyway, so on Friday it was announced that Toronto and Peel are entering the lockdown phase again starting at midnight tonight (12:01 am Monday morning). Things are a little bit different this time around though so here’s what the means:

1. It’s gonna last 28 days until December 21st.
2. schools/child care centres are staying open
3. Doctor’s offices and pharmacies are staying open
4. Essential stores are staying open (grocery, hardware, supply stores etc) at 50% capacity
5. all other stores are curbside pickup or delivery only
6. No indoor or outdoor dinning – take out or delivery only
7. no gatherings inside your house – only people you live with
8. Gatherings outside of 10 or less, with social distancing rules in place
9. Places of worship are no longer allowed to operate at 30% capacity, but must drop to 10 people max in the building
10. Movie theatres, casinos, gyms etc are closed (but I think they have been for a while now)
11. sports and recreations, classes, lessons – I think all are cancelled.

Now what is different this time around is that there are only 2 regions that are in this modified lockdown. So the problem becomes this: will people go to other regions for things? There is no travel ban, and it would be IMPOSSIBLE to police. Malls are closed except for essential services in them. But the stores are encouraged to develop a curbside pickup option and continue to sell online.

With the holiday season upon us, this is very interesting and tricky. I get that people want to buy in a store but they need to stay home right now. There is a large scale plea for people to boycott places like Amazon and Walmart and to shop at local small businesses, but that is also a little impractical for a lot of people. For instance, I don’t have a car – if I wanted to shop at one of these small businesses, I would have a hard time doing so.

Thankfully I don’t do a lot of extra shopping. For the foreseeable future all I will need is groceries and a pharmacy. Possibly a dollar store but that is usually all non-essential things

And double thankfully, I did all my weekly shopping on Friday before the announcement was made! I went to the dollar store to get supplies for Christmas gifts for my students. I went to Walmart and got new sheets and pj’s. I like to see these things before I buy them. Starting on Monday I can’t go into the store to look at these non-essential items. I also did my weekly grocery shopping a few hours before the announcement and missed the panic shopping that will inevitably happen this weekend – even though the grocery stores are staying open!

So we are heading into crisis mode once more. Hopefully things will settle down and people will be responsible. I know I will be! I can’t speak for others, or even for people who live in this house since they seem to not care about rules (even house rules) but I can only control myself and make sure I am doing the best I can.