Women of the Pandemic: Stories from the Frontlines of COVID-19

ALSO BY LAUREN McKEON

No More Nice Girls

F-Bomb

Copyright © 2021 by Lauren McKeon

First edition published 2021

McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request.

ISBN: 9780771050398

Ebook ISBN: 9780771050480

Cover and book design by Andrew Roberts

Cover images: (faces) adamkaz / Getty Images; (woman) Olga Maloushkina / Shutterstock Images; (lettering) Julia August / Shutterstock Images

McClelland & Stewart,

a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

a Penguin Random House Company

www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

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To all the women on the front line—thank you.

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

1. The Pandemic Arrives

2. Feeding a Country

3. Communities Come Together

4. Virus on the Front Line

5. Crisis at Home

6. The She-cession

7. Every Decision Counts

8. A High Toll

9. Recovery

Epilogue

Notes

Acknowledgements

Introduction

In early December 2019, the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was bustling. Customers wove their way through the narrowly spaced stalls, shrewdly eyeing coils of octopus, slabs of fat-laced meat, pyramids of fresh greens. It’s possible they bought a freshly slaughtered animal: tuna, deer, hedgehog, something else. In certain areas, their shoes likely sloshed through the water vendors use to constantly hose down produce, fish, and other perishable goods, giving the nickname wet market to such places in China and other countries across Asia. Maybe their fingertips brushed a stranger’s hand as they browsed, or when they paid, or through any other simple accident. Or perhaps none of that happened before they went home to families, groceries in hand, ready to cook dinner, ready to relax. Months later, science was still unable to definitively explain what separated the first unlucky group—twenty-seven market vendors, employees, and customers—from everyone else in Wuhan, including at least a dozen others who suddenly arrived in the city’s hospitals that month with mysterious pneumonia-like symptoms.

It didn’t take long for doctors and researchers in China to realize the puzzling virus was new, highly contagious, and deadly. The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission announced the potential SARS-like illness to media in late December. In less than a week, the number of cases climbed from forty-one to fifty-nine. Then, on January 11, a sixty-one-year-old man who was a regular customer at the market died. He had been admitted to the hospital after a seven-day fever, persistent cough, and difficulty breathing. Five days after he became sick, his fifty-three-year-old wife, who’d never been to the market, was also admitted. Still, at the time, few fully grasped the wildfire nature of the yet-unnamed novel coronavirus. By January 19, both the Chinese government and the World Health Organization (WHO) had estimated the virus had only limited potential for human-to-human transmission. Four days later, China abruptly closed Wuhan’s borders, shutting off transportation both to/from and within the city. Seventeen people had died, and at least another 570 were sick.

A week after that, the WHO declared a global health emergency. If [China] fails to control it, then we should also be grateful to them, because they have demonstrated that it cannot be controlled, Dr. Allison McGeer, an infectious disease specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, told media that same day. If these public health measures are not enough, then none of the rest of us will be able to do it either. People were worried the virus could be another SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), which has, to date, killed 800 people worldwide, or MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), which has not been eradicated and which had, by the end of 2019, killed over 850 people. McGeer, who had been on the front lines of the SARS fight, and who had herself contracted the virus, repeatedly assured media that, for now, for Canadians, the virus wasn’t anything to worry about. There are things that should frighten you about this coronavirus, she added, but getting it in Toronto today is not one of them. Still, she cautioned, the modern world had never before watched the emergence of a new virus. Like other medical experts, she urged calm. In North America, the dominant refrain took shape: This virus would not be like SARS. It would not be like MERS. It would not be like the 1918 influenza pandemic. It was not the plague.

Those predictions, as it turned out, were half-right. COVID-19 was finally named on February 11, a simple abbreviation of coronavirus disease 2019. The day after, China’s death toll surpassed 1,100, and more than 46,000 cases were confirmed. Outside of the epicentre, twenty-four countries were also reporting cases. Then, on Valentine’s Day, the virus killed an eighty-year-old tourist in Paris. Cases in South Korea surged, all linked back to one church and one woman. Then, Italy. Haunting images emerged of iconic, seemingly never-empty streets, now policed and abandoned; painfully sparse sick bays housed rows of masked, frail bodies; agonized doctors in robin-blue protective gear told of rationing vital equipment, choosing who would live and die. For healthcare workers in Canada, it became another signal that perhaps we would not escape whatever hell was emerging, after all. For many others outside the field, however, the story remained fuzzy, distant—a ship looming on the horizon. That changed on March 11, 2020, when, roughly one hundred days after the first person presented with symptoms in Wuhan, the WHO named COVID-19 a global pandemic.

WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock and we are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction, said the organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, at a media conference. At the time of his announcement, there were more than 118,000 cases in 114 countries, and nearly 4,300 people had died. We have never before seen a pandemic sparked by a coronavirus, he added. And we have never before seen a pandemic that can be controlled.

When I heard the news, I was in my office at Yonge and Bloor streets, one of the busiest intersections in Toronto, where I work as the deputy editor of Reader’s Digest Canada. I headed home that night on my usual sardine-tin subway car, stopping at a big box near my apartment for groceries. As I pondered yogourt flavours, another customer, a woman wearing a mask, marvelled at the lack of toilet paper, Lysol, pasta, canned anything. I don’t know if she was talking to me, or to no one, but I smiled and said something inane like, Isn’t it wild? We both seemed shell-shocked. I saw her again at the checkout, apologetically sanitizing the conveyer belt. Behind us, a couple had a cart piled high and clinking. The next morning, I looked out from my building’s window, onto another normally busy intersection, and for the first time in the two years I’d lived there, saw no cars. It stayed apocalyptically calm for hours, days, weeks. At night, under a newly pinprick sky, I’d watch busses rattle up and down the street, empty.

—

As stay-at-home orders were issued across North America in early March, it became clear that the story of the pandemic would be different for women—that, in many ways, the story of the pandemic was the story of women. In Canada, women comprise 81 per cent of healthcare workers. Notably, they make up the vast majority of nurses, social workers, and personal support workers (PSWs). Beyond the healthcare front line, the New York Times estimated that one in three jobs held by women had been designated as essential during nationwide shutdowns, and that racialized women, specifically, held more essential jobs than anybody else. Throughout the pandemic, these women were tasked with keeping our bodies and minds healthy, with keeping us fed, with keeping our hospitals and public spaces clean, with helping the most vulnerable among us, and with being near our bedsides when we died. They led us through, even as they lost the most, and the harsh, uncomfortable truth is that sometimes they led us simply because they couldn’t afford to lose more.

To compound all of this, at the same time they were performing these essential jobs, many women abruptly became responsible for home-schooling their kids, juggling their children’s needs with their own, often without support. Single and low-income mothers scrambled to buy diapers, to figure out child care, to keep scraping by. Still more women lost their income, accounting for 62 per cent of the job losses between late February and March, and for 50 per cent more vanished work hours than men. Women between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four, in particular, lost more than two times the jobs that men did. Economists began calling the chilling economic nosedive in North America the she-cession, noting that for the first time in history, women were more affected by mass job losses than men. And, as COVID-19 swept through long-term care (LTC) homes in Canada at twice the rate of other developed countries, we also became one of the only places in the world where more women than men were getting sick and dying. Many people’s worlds were getting smaller, scarier, more uncertain, but it was arguably women who felt this most keenly—women who balanced barefoot on the razor’s edge.

But it was also women who, amid the horror and disaster, gave us hope, leadership, and resilience. Across Canada, when we were at our most isolated, women brought us together. On Facebook, two Toronto women, Mita Hans and Valentina Harper, decided to reach out to their neighbours with a modest question: How can we help? The resulting mutual aid group—who, in a refusal to give in to doomsday fearmongers, cheekily named themselves Caremongers—quickly became a worldwide movement. Within a month, similar groups had formed across the United Kingdom, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, and the United States, all with the intent of ensuring their community’s most vulnerable were not, once again, forgotten. Women banded together to organize mask-making drives, stitching and distributing over 220,000 free coverings through the grassroots group Canada Sews. Elsewhere, women offered free emergency therapy services to frontline workers and organized funding drives to pay people’s bills when their Canada Emergency Response Benefit didn’t arrive fast enough. In Nova Scotia, Black women lobbied for COVID-19 testing sites in historically overlooked and underserviced neighbourhoods. In every city and town, women were determined to bring out the best in us, even when we were told to expect the worst. People gave millions of dollars, gave time, gave themselves.

It was such a huge undertaking, said Lee-Anne Moore-Thibert, who founded Canada Sews. It was such a huge show of Canadian spirit. When she started the group on March 22, she named it Durham Sews, thinking she’d just make a few masks with a few friends for Oshawa, Ontario, and, maybe, the surrounding region. Within twenty-four hours, she had received eight hundred requests and more than three hundred people had joined her sewing army. Watching the numbers climb, she remembers joking with her husband, like, Ha-ha-ha, let’s see if we can hit fifty thousand masks. It was the most far-fetched number she could think of—so distant and so big it didn’t even really seem like a goal. But within a few days, the group had grown large enough that she’d renamed it Ontario Sews. Within a week, it became Canada Sews. There were so many requests, and so many volunteers to coordinate, that Moore-Thibert, who is also a managing partner at a paralegal firm, an at-home caregiver for her mother-in-law, and had recently given birth to her first child, was working twenty-two hours every day. She’d wake up at 5 a.m. to nurse her daughter, answer requests, and coordinate volunteers. And, on April 30, when the organization hit that previously unimaginable number of fifty thousand mask deliveries, she broke down and cried. It felt like every hour was filled with fear about the future, but at least she could say that, when it seemed like the world was ending, she did one thing that helped people.

Beyond these everyday small acts of leadership, were the big, life-or-death ones. I have never seen so many women leaders—or their compassion, vulnerability, and humanity—so widely celebrated. In Vancouver’s Gastown, artists painted colourful, calm-faced murals of Dr. Theresa Tam and Dr. Bonnie Henry. Others emblazoned the likenesses of the country’s many women public health officers on T-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, and pins, usually donating proceeds to various foodbanks and charities. In Alberta, where Deena Hinshaw is the chief medical officer of health, in just six days, one woman sold over 750 shirts that read What Would Dr. Hinshaw Do?, giving all $20,023 in sales to the province’s foodbanks. B.C.’s Henry, easily the most popular of the bunch, even got her own fan club and a namesake pink-and-plum John Fluevog shoe. In June, the New York Times ran a profile of her under the headline The Top Doctor Who Aced the Coronavirus Test. Looking warily toward the failed leadership to the south during the first wave, observers praised the way Canada’s majority-women medical leadership navigated one of the worst crises in modern history. Henry’s practical advice mantra resonated and reverberated, becoming both a balm and a gospel: Be kind, be calm, be safe.

—

Of course, watching the news in those early weeks, very little felt safe. After Italy shocked the world, harrowing images began to emerge from New York’s frontline battle. Photos circulated of overfilled funeral homes and morgues. In one, rows of cardboard boxes arranged in neat columns lined a darkened room, with bold labels reading head all pointing in the same direction. In another, an army of refrigerated trucks filled the parking lot of a morgue, providing readymade extra storage for the too-full funeral homes. Trenches opened on New York’s Hart Island, packed with unadorned wood boxes holding the city’s unclaimed dead. In Brooklyn, bodies in garish orange bags hemmed hospital hallways and loading bays. Here in Canada, cases cascaded through long-term care facilities. Sophie Grégoire Trudeau tested positive for the virus, and Justin Trudeau, in self-isolation, began giving daily updates from the steps of Rideau Cottage. Canada’s borders closed. News headlines and social media feeds flickered rising case counts, deaths, panic, disbelief, misinformation. Now, people called it the plague—though others called it a hoax.

For those of us not on the front lines, the stretch of hours at home could oscillate between fear and boredom, coping and denial. During the first months of the pandemic, we baked lumpy banana bread and sourdough starters, and binge-watched Tiger King. We put together puzzles, made whipped coffee, and wondered why every streaming service wanted us to watch Contagion. We shifted our social circles to Zoom, watched our own face freeze in triple chins, said our I love yous to foreheads. We walked our dogs and held our breath as we jogged past other people, veering onto empty roads. At night, we could not sleep and we scrolled and clicked, read the terrible news over and over. All of us waited for updates, more information, new ways to be safe. We learned about the pandemic in statistics and covered faces and brief obituaries. But we didn’t always hear about the women on the front lines, struggling to keep us healthy, struggling to keep us fed, struggling to keep the country from falling apart. We didn’t always have the time, or emotional space, to listen.

Women of the Pandemic is meant to remedy that. While it cannot examine the entirety of the ongoing pandemic, it can endeavour to introduce you to the women who led us through the first year—and who, in doing so, changed the world. This book will tell you who they were, what they feared, and what kept them going in the dark. It will tell you about their hopes for us and themselves, about their triumphs and their terrible losses. It will illuminate what they did, and why they matter, and it will work to keep their generation-defining experiences from being erased—by silence, by inattention, by dismissal. Together, these women’s stories capture an extraordinary, unprecedented, life-altering year. Their resilience is inspiring. And the myriad ways in which society failed them are devastating. Women have never before played such a vital, essential role in a global crisis, and they’ve never been the ones who suffered the most. The societal progress of the past two centuries has put them at the messy, murky front. We didn’t always take care of them. Now, as we exit the first year of the pandemic, we owe it to these women to pay attention, to remember both their victories and their sacrifices.

In the following chapters, you will walk COVID-19 wards alongside emergency room doctors and nurses, hospital cleaners, hospitality workers, PSWs, and infectious disease researchers. You will feel the curved bow of their slumped shoulders and their grief. You will sit next to a trucker on her return from a long-haul delivery from the U.S., burning with fever, delirious and unable to cross the border and go home. You’ll attend the funeral of a woman who worked at a meat processing plant with her husband, and who contracted the virus during one of Canada’s worst early outbreaks. You will meet grocery store workers with aching feet and pounding heads, full of worry and exhaustion; mothers who juggled impossible task loads, who were pushed out of their jobs, who gave birth during a swirling pandemic; entrepreneurs who balanced their businesses on the brink, who lost livelihoods, who lost dreams; hospital workers who endured racist, anti-Asian slurs while riding the bus, on their way to keep us all safe. You will understand what it is to don layers of personal protective equipment (PPE) before dashing to swab Canada’s first COVID-19 patient, kickstarting vital research into the mystery virus. You will feel the twinning determination and loneliness of one of the country’s top vaccine researchers as she gets closer and closer to a solution in a lab far from home, not having seen her children in months. And you will slip behind closed doors and witness decisions that saved, and frustrated, the country.

I would go home to my husband and say, ‘You don’t understand,’ says Fiorella Talarico, a sixty-year-old hospital cleaner in Ontario’s Peel Region, who, during the first wave of the pandemic, primarily worked on the COVID-19 floor. What she meant was: nobody could understand the exact toll of COVID-19 until they had witnessed the front line; until they had seen dozens of intubated patients, eerily empty waiting rooms, void of anxious families and loving visitors, rooms occupied one day and not the next; until they came home, day after day, and burst into tears. Talarico quickly realized people were experiencing the pandemic in separate realities. In one, the virus was distant, still scary but also unlikely—a bogeyman that wrecked economies, vacations, mental health, and social bonds. In another, hers, it was a mind-boggling, untreatable onslaught of death and pain—a fickle Grim Reaper that claimed both the susceptible and previously healthy, unyielding and without reason. Women of the Pandemic aims to merge those realities, to bring us closer to one another, and to ground us in our shared humanity: to help us see how, as Talarico put it, COVID-19 changed all of us.

—

I’m writing this introduction in July 2020, and I’m still afraid. I’m afraid when I see photos of exuberant crowds of bronzed and burned bodies at the beach, at the park. I understand why they want to hug each other, delight in casual touch, share a beer. I understand and empathize with their need for connection, but I am afraid of their disregard, of their selfishness. I am afraid for the countries that appear to have given up on containing the virus, and I’m afraid for those who are so fatigued with this fight they appear to have forgotten it. I am very afraid of those who believe the virus doesn’t exist, that governments played make-believe with a pandemic, that the current worldwide death count of over 161,000 is inconsequential. A couple of weeks ago, on my thirty-sixth birthday, a sixtyish woman in a white sundress and gold jewellery confronted my aunt and me about our masks. It was sweltering out and she asked if we enjoyed wearing them. We carefully told her they were a pain but that they were necessary for everyone’s safety. She shook her head at us, the fools, and remarked, It’s all a hoax.

There is a generous reading of such deliberate distortion. That is, in the face of enormous global upheaval and a forever-altered world, perhaps it is human to want to deny. Maybe certain pandemic conspiracy theorists and rule-breakers have something in common that everybody else, however angrily, can understand: an inability to confront the immeasurable loss of COVID-19. It’s tempting to pretend nothing has to change; it’s daunting to accept there is no firm end date. But to do either is to undercut every death, every sacrifice, every loss, every woman who did her job. In this time of large, unfathomable griefs, I have my own small griefs, too. Like many of us, I haven’t seen my family in months. I haven’t celebrated over dinner, or toasted a glass. My hair has split ends and I have cried alone, more times than I can count. My boxing club—my place of community, strength, and mental stillness—didn’t make it through the pandemic. I have spent the early stages of Toronto’s reopening this summer masked and helping to tear down a place that felt like a second home, or sometimes a first. Even as we mourn, though, we reimagine. For now, my club meets in a public park and, spread six feet apart, we punch the air. Next year: who knows? All of us are trying.

It’s impossible to guess at the full consequences of COVID-19. University of British Columbia sociology professor Sylvia Fuller said in July of the disproportionate impact of the virus on women, By this point it’s become clear that the pandemic is not the ‘great equalizer.’ As much as we pine for, or rush toward, the new normal, the pandemic isn’t over. We cannot know how far the ripples will extend, or what else will be redrawn. Surely, we’ll see both good and bad changes, resurgent kindness and unaffordable setbacks. Already, we’ve seen calls for better social supports, health care, and higher pay for essential workers. Already we’ve seen a widening gender pay gap, an uneven return to work, and an increase in gender-based violence. As we attempt to chart our paths forward, it’s important for us to reflect on this exceptional year, to honour it, and