Our lucky number is 13: How coming last on COVID put N.L. on top

I noticed something interesting last Saturday: a chart that ranked the provinces and territories by recent cases of COVID-19, and sorted them relative to population.

With just 0.3 cases per 100,000 people in that preceding week, Newfoundland and Labrador ranked at the end of the provinces — and the territories, too.

As I write this on Friday, we're still in last place on a chart maintained by the New York Times, but a recent spate of cases in the last few days has brought it up to 0.4, and we're now tied with Yukon.

Newfoundland and Labrador — with a small population and a historically smaller economy — is accustomed to lagging behind other provinces for economic rankings.

This, though, is the kind of ranking that people can get behind. While pandemic restrictions may be chafing — who wouldn't want to go to a big party at this time of year, or get to a period where we don't need to wear masks while we shop? — Newfoundland and Labrador has gotten to a place that is the envy of jurisdictions that are feeling overwhelmed with COVID right now.

"You know, Newfoundland and Labrador did it right," said singer and satirist Sean Panting, who made people laugh this week with a parody of Simani's The Mummers Song.

"We've fared much, much better than a lot of other places, so there's a sense of pride that comes with that, I think," Panting told The St. John's Morning Show on Thursday.

No mummers 'lowed in, if you please

Panting's parody is topical and on point: mummering (which has had a long and sometimes dark history, with some violence way, way back in the day) is the tradition that now comes with a risk. Going house to house and not knowing who's coming in? No thanks, the song asserts.

WATCH | A cartoon version of Sean Panting's new parody of The Mummers Song:

Mummers, nice mummers, get lost: A parody from Sean Panting

4 years ago

Duration 2:23

Here's Sean Panting with a topical tune for Christmas in the time of COVID-19 ... apologies to Simani.

Or, as Edward Riche put it in a column here last weekend, "This year the virus is novel and nasty so we simply cannot be at it. Cannot. Be. At. It."

While Sean's rendition of The Mummers Song has been in my head this week ("There's nothing like COVID to shag up yer plans/ Granmudder said as we all washed our hands"), I do keep coming back to another song, one I mentioned in a column back in March, when the COVID wave was crashing on Canada. "Thank God we're surrounded by water" is the refrain of the song of the same name that Tom Cahill wrote for Joan Morrissey, in quite another era and in quite another context.

Surely being an island has helped over the last nine months. Newfoundland and Labrador's ever-controversial ban on incoming travellers will likely be debated for years, long after the vaccines are all delivered, long after we come to the point where we need to think about when we all started wearing masks at the supermarket. Despite the ban's detractors, the government says the evidence of the effectiveness of its plan is in the relatively few numbers of new cases.

It's all relative

On Thursday, Dr. Janice Fitzgerald, the chief medical officer of health, announced there were five new cases of COVID-19. She announced the same number again on Friday. You could practically hear a groan as people reacted to the news (in fact, a friend tells me there was an actual groan in his house); we had not had a number that high since Nov. 21, when new cases were escalating in the wave that has been causing so much havoc elsewhere in the country.

As troublesome as it may look, compared with the zeroes and singletons that we were accustomed to, that count of five is tiny compared to other counts around the country.

That same day, Alberta reported 1,571 cases, Ontario had 2,432, and Quebec had 1,855. Yes, they are much larger provinces, but even when ranked by relative populations, they are much, much higher rates of infection. (Alberta's average daily caseload over the last week has been 97 times higher than our own, when ranked by cases per 100,000 people.)

On Wednesday, the first vaccines were administered in the province. Fitzgerald did them herself — a reminder that her background in family medicine had quite a lot to do with public health protection and campaigns.

WATCH | Two health-care workers received the first COVID-19 vaccines in N.L. on Thursday at the Health Sciences Centre in St. John's: 

First COVID-19 vaccine given in N.L.

4 years ago

Duration 0:44

Public health nurse Ellen Foley-Vic receives the first inoculation in N.L. of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against COVID-19, at Memorial University's medical school in St. John's.

Immunizing the province — and the nation — will take a while. The Public Health Agency of Canada expects that any Canadian who wants a vaccine will be able to get it by next September; for many, though, it will happen months earlier.

I was struck by the number of people I saw who felt that vaccines meant for here should be sent instead to Alberta, which has been on fire with the virus. (As of Thursday night, Alberta had 86,161 cases.)

It's an honorable thought, and I think in keeping with the best kind of character traits here. In a tight spot, a lot of us will pitch in and help someone in worse shape.

Panting referred to this very thing when CBC spoke to him a couple of days ago, when he looked back at what he called a "garbage" year.

"We had a chance to be our best selves a couple of times already," he said.

"[With] Snowmageddon, we really saw people helping each other. And there was some really beautiful stuff that happened in amongst all of the crappiness," Panting said.

WATCH | Sean Panting wrote this song to mark January's blizzard and weeklong state of emergency in the St. John's area: 

"Again, with COVID, we get to be a world leader in something.… I feel like the thing that 2020 has done for me personally, and maybe for a lot of us, is to make us a little more compassionate. Or, at least, I hope so."

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