Thursday, March 28, 2024

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Your Road Ahead: How we’re going to live with COVID-19

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It has been more than 800 days since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Nobody knew the chaos and confusion to come, or when the collective nightmare would end.

Now, many Canadians have seen a satisfying return to a sense of normalcy, but the world is still learning how to recover and navigate this new reality.

In “Your Road Ahead” CHCH News looks at how the virus thoroughly interrupted everyone’s lives and pushed our most critical resources to their breaking point, but also the processes being made to bounce back and what work still lies ahead.

Education

Online learning became the new reality as schools were closed in March 2020 when Ontario declared a state of emergency.

Between March 2020 and May 2021 Ontario schools were closed for 20 weeks, not including additional regional closures. That is longer than any other Canadian province or territory.

The closures then returned the following school year with the Omicron variant extending the winter holiday.

Experts say students are suffering from “learning loss,” which means a loss of knowledge and skills due to being out of the classroom. They say the time isolating at home has also resulted in behavioural problems.

While challenges remain to make up for lost time, teachers at Fitch Street Public School say their students are starting to rebound now that they are back in class.

Dawn Danko, the chair of the board for Hamilton Wentworth District School Board, says the Ministry of Education has since made investments aimed at supporting students and recover from learning loss.

Healthcare 

The tragedy of the pandemic unfolded most clearly at long-term care centres and hospitals.

More than a third of all COVID-19 related deaths in Ontario have been at long-term care centres. The Ontario government says as of June 14, 4,587 residents have died, along with 11 workers.

Meanwhile, healthcare workers were at the front line of the fight against the virus. With an immense amount of people ending up in hospital with COVID-19, health care staff were forced to work extra hours and intensive care units were pushed to their limits.

The pressure on hospitals resulted in severe burn out of healthcare workers. A recent survey from the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario found the level of burn out has climbed to 75.3 per cent. More than a quarter of nurses reported taking time off to manage stress, anxiety or other mental health issues, while 69 per cent say they plan to leave their position within five years.

Additionally, hospitals across Ontario have had to deal with a massive backlog of non-urgent surgeries. Right now there is around 1,400 children and 6,000 adults waiting for surgery.

To help work through the backlog, Hamilton Health Sciences is going to start doing some procedures normally done in Hamilton, at the West Lincoln Memorial Hospital in Grimsby.

Moving back to the office 

The pandemic has changed the way we do our jobs, whether it be office workers doing Zoom meetings from their living room or frontline workers having to follow protocols to keep themselves safe. Experts say some of these changes are likely going to persist.

Employers are now tasked with the job of figuring out how to approach the return to the office. They have to decide whether to continue remote working, continue mask mandates and other protocols, or even having a vaccine mandate in place.

Remote work has made the line between working and not-working very thin. The provincial government has since stepped in to address the issue. A right to disconnect policy has been added to Ontario’s Employment Standards Act. Now, employers with 25 or more workers must have a written policy in place.

The new rule came into effect on January 1 with a deadline to have the new policy in place on June 2.

What does disconnecting from work actually mean? The Ontario government says it means an employee does not engage in work-related communications, such as emails, phone/video calls and sending/reviewing messages.

Travel

As rules and restrictions continue to relax people are quickly getting back out to explore the world, but Canada’s busiest airport struggled to keep up.

People experienced longer than expected wait times at Pearson International Airport in April and May. An issue the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority blamed on staffing shortages.

The Tourism Industry Association of Canada says the shortages are a result of workers leaving the travel industry when it shut down due to the pandemic.

The Transport Ministry of Canada responded by suspending mandatory randomized testing of incoming travelers until July 1, when it will come back at off-site locations away from airports.

The federal government also ended the vaccine mandate for domestic and outbound travelers, but the mandate remains for those entering Canada and the ArriveCAN app still needs to be used.

Also complicating travel plans are major problems at the passport office. Long lines of people waiting all day to renew their passport, only to be turned away.

Officials are now working to hire hundreds of additional staff for Service Canada locations to help bring the situation under control.

Managing misinformation and disinformation 

A huge piece of this pandemic puzzle has been communicating a complex and evolving situation to the public. What makes it even tougher is, depending on where you get your information, the message being presented is a lot different.

The pandemic has led to occupations on Ottawa to a growing movement of anti-vaxxers and lots of mistrust in the media.

The president of the Canadian Association of Journalists says many news organizations are creating misinformation units that debunk claims online that a piece of information is false, as well as fact-checking units to make sure all the information coming in and going out is accurate. However, he says the fight against misinformation following the pandemic will be a difficult up hill battle.

As we look ahead to a post pandemic life, it’s clear the aftermath of COVID-19 will stay with us inside our schools, hospitals, office buildings, airports and in our newsroom as we work to bring you the latest on this ongoing recovery.

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