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The Current Transcript for March 31, 2020

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: So it's never 100 percent, but I'd be willing to bet anything that if this virus acts like every one of the viruses that we know, people who recover are really protected against reinfection.

MATT GALLOWAY: As the coronavirus spreads, any people are wondering how we'll get out of this. And one of the most common questions we're getting is whether those who recover, and most people who are infected will, are immune from further infection. We'll get some answers on that coming up in about an hour. Also this morning, New York City is one of the greatest cities on this planet, a teeming mass of humanity with the whole world represented in its five boroughs. As that city falls silent under the grips of COVID-19, a conversation this morning with New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. And as we shelter in our homes and apartments, what are we missing? Perhaps more importantly, who?

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MG: The cost of isolation for a social species like ours. Plus, Tom Power speaks with Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard about the two weeks of daily concerts the singer songwriter has been streaming from his home. We begin though, in an Ontario senior's residence, suddenly feeling the full force of this pandemic. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. This is an extended edition of The Current.

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Vancouver woman volunteered at her father’s nursing home to help fight COVID-19

Guests: Sarah Gardiner, Debra Drew, Laura Tamblyn Watts

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VOICE: We all share a collective responsibility to protect our seniors and vulnerable populations. During this time, social isolation can have a terrible effect on our seniors. I know these measures are not easy for many families. I know it's hard not being able to visit loved ones, but it's the only way to protect them. We know each moment with them is precious.

MG: Premier Doug Ford calling for an iron ring around Ontario's nursing homes. The situation is just as desperate. And provinces like Quebec, Nova Scotia and British Columbia, this novel coronavirus is spreading fast. And Canada's seniors homes and staff inside the facilities are scrambling to catch up without catching the virus themselves. Sarah Gardner is a registered nurse at Pine Crest Nursing Home in Bobcaygeon, Ontario. At least 11 residents of the home died after contracting COVID-19, and roughly half the staff are sick as well. Sarah Gardiner, good morning.

SARAH GARDINER: Good morning, Matt.

MG: Describe the situation on the weekend. What was it like in Pine Crest?

SARAH GARDINER: InI arrived on Saturday to a place that was almost unrecognisable. I have been describing it as a war zone. The whole main area of the nursing home where you normally the residents congregate and participate in activities was empty except for piles of supplies and equipment laying around all over the place. The staff are all dressed in full PPE gear and there's just this weird quiet except for the phone ringing off the hook. What did you have to do on that day? I had to carry out my normal duties, which is trying to keep things running smoothly, administrating the meds to my group of residents, assessing everybody. But because it takes on a different dimension in these cases, because it also means I'm having to pronounce residents that are dying or when they die, I have to pronounce them because our docs are not coming in into the home, making it innumerable phone calls to family, some very hard phone calls either to let them know that their loved one has passed or to let them know that they're going to pass. And I don't want them to be surprised when that next phone call comes.

MG: What is it like having to do that work?

SARAH GARDINER: Under normal circumstances matt, I love my work and I still do. But it becomes very not just physically stressful, but emotionally stressful. It was a heartbreaking situation because it seemed like every time we turned around, there was a new resident who had issues or needed medication or was dying or had passed. And it was pretty overwhelming.

MG: And these are residents that you would know well working there.

SARAH GARDINER: I do. They're like family to us. It's a small nursing home in a very small area, you know, and we get to know these people. Many of them have been there for many, many years. You develop relationships with these people. I jokingly refer to them as my elderly, confused friends.

MG: How are those those residents dealing with everything that's happening around them? Because as you say, it's not life as normal in the residence.

SARAH GARDINER: I noticed that it was quite stressful on the residents as well, especially those that we're constantly aware that something was going on for many of them who have Alzheimer's. They don't really seem to understand what is happening for the ones who do. It's very stressful because they're trapped in their rooms. They can't leave the room. It's a very. And that becomes a very small area after a couple of days. They can't see their family members. They hadn't even been able to have showers. Recently, I had a couple of residents who came up to me and said, Sarah, when can we have a shower? And I'm like, I don't know. I will leave a note and ask day shift tomorrow and see what we can do, but, you know, it's they're frightened and the anxiety levels are quite high.

MG: As you said, it's also a small space and often in those spaces, there will be shared rooms, people will be close together. What's being done to ensure that the virus, as widespread as it is, doesn't spread any further?

SARAH GARDINER: Well, it's a little tricky in our home because of the layout of the home and the fact that there are semi-private rooms, but there are also several ward rooms, which are four people per room under normal circumstances that can be managed. But in this circumstance, it's very difficult. You may have in a four bedroom, you may have one person, one resident who's dead or dying. You may have another one who is quite ill. You might have another one who is just you're not too sure about. And then the fourth one may be fine for the time being, but having that mix all in one room is quite difficult to manage and it makes it very hard to try to ensure the safety of the ones who are still well.

MG: And so those residents, they're not separated? They're not physically separated in those spaces?

SARAH GARDINER: No, The only physical separation is provided by curtains.

MG: Wow.

SARAH GARDINER: Yeah.

MG: The other side of this, that's incredibly sad to hear. The other side of this is something that concerns you, which is that at least 24 of the staff members have tested positive. What does that have to what does that do to the staffing situation in the residence?

SARAH GARDINER: It decimated our staff. The shifts were just not showing up because either the people who were assigned to show up that shift were sick or staying home because they had a vulnerable family member. They didn't want to expose or used to being a bit short staffed in good times, but this had basically decimated the staff. And altogether, when you only have two or three people out of seven that actually come. There's no way that two or three people can take care of 65 residents.

MG: How worried are you about you yourself getting sick?

SARAH GARDINER: Well, Matt, I finally I actually had swab results done and I got my results yesterday and I'm negative. So now it becomes a bit of a double edged sword because I had been unwell and thought, OK, I've had the COVID. I don't have the swab results, but I feel better, I'll go back to work. Now because I found I was negative and thinking, OK, I went back to work, so now I'm still at risk. It's worrisome.

MG: What is your biggest fear? This is happening in this residence, but there are other seniors residences where we see the virus turning up. What's your biggest fear based on what you saw this past weekend?

SARAH GARDINER: My biggest fear right now is that it is going to hit long term care residences across this country and they're not going to be ready and it's going to wipe out the resident populations in long term care homes across this country. And I am very frightened that that's going to occur.

MG: It's a really sad story. I appreciate you talking to us and I want you to take care of yourself as well, Sarah Thank you.

SARAH GARDINER: Thank you, Matt.

MG: Sarah Gardiner is a registered nurse at Pine Crest Nursing Home in Bobcaygeon, Ontario. In North Vancouver, a resident at Lynn Valley Care Centre was the first person in Canada to die from COVID-19. Ten more people have died there since, and more than 60 others have contracted the virus. Debra Drew's father is one of them. He's a resident of the Lynn Valley Care Centre. Debra, good morning to you.

DEBRA DREW: Good morning.

MG: How's your dad doing?

DEBRA DREW: Well, I just got an email yesterday that he is COVID-free.

MG: That's fantastic.

DEBRA DREW: Yes, it is.

MG: Given everything that your family went through, I can't imagine what that would have been like to receive that email.

DEBRA DREW: Well, you know, he's very resilient physically. So, yeah, we went through the ten day process where he was declared positive and then within the ten days they declare here, that's the marker, 10 day marker, that they're COVID-free. So it's been a real journey.

MG: I would think so. How did you find out first that there had been an outbreak of COVID-19 at Lynn Valley?

DEBRA DREW: Well, when I went to visit my father on March the 6th and the administrators were just putting the posters on the doors that there was an outbreak and that there were no visitors allowed. So that was it feels very long, very long time ago. It was over three weeks ago.

MG: We just heard Sarah Gardner describe the conditions inside the Pine Crest Nursing Home in Bobcaygeon, Ontario. What were the conditions like for residents at Lynn Valley when all of this was happening?

DEBRA DREW: Well, there were similar conditions. We didn't, we have some double rooms and people were sharing, but they tried to rectify that situation and put each person in isolation. So it was very similar other otherwise. The staffing was a problem first day and there were six ladies, we actually went in after a town meeting that we had had a town hall meeting where the officials had told us the situation and all the information we needed to protect ourselves. But my brother and I did go in the first day and it didn't look any different. It was business as usual. You know, so that was the onset where we were going every day for the next three weeks, my sister and I.

MG: And what sort of precautions were you taking when you're trying to help out there?

DEBRA DREW: We would wear gloves and masks and later on we would have the full gowns on masks and we protected our feet as well. There was enhanced cleaning going on as well. So it was kind of like an ICU. I would compare it to that.

MG: How did your dad respond to seeing you kind of all suited up like that?

DEBRA DREW: Yes. Well, he had Alzheimer's and so he's not aware of the situation and he has other disabilities as well. He can't see that well, but he would say to my sister and I that we had some beautiful dresses on. So that was for us I think a relief that he was not totally aware of what was going on, although that changed as well. One day he was very lucid. It was a day by day adventure. He said the Lord's Prayer and he orated in a very loud voice because he can't hear as well either to all the caregivers and the nurses how grateful he was. They were taking such good care of everyone. And there were some tearful moments as well.

MG: It's so distressing to hear these stories and whether it's what Sarah is describing or the situations that are coming out of Lynn Valley or other care homes across this country. Is your sense that enough is being done to protect residents like your dad?

DEBRA DREW: Well, no, the answer is no. It was a shock to all of us. We were not prepared as a community. So there were, as I said, six ladies that went in and we were there every day taking care of our loved ones, taking care of the other residents. There was fear of the working conditions and so a lot of the staff did not turn up. And we felt compelled to stay. So I have the same comparison as Sarah, that it was like a warzone. And we were feeding residents. We were soothing them. We were doing everything for them to make them more comfortable in a very changed situation. It was very necessary to do that. I've learned so much through this experience that we must be better prepared for these emergency situations.

MG: What just finally, what would you say to family members of of people who may be living in these residences, who are worried by what they're hearing? They're alarmed and they're really frightened. What would you say to them?

DEBRA DREW: I would say listen to the senior advocates who have the research and who have studied nursing homes in your area and in your province. I would say look at the system and how it's working. I've learned so much about ours here, the private ones, the public and the working conditions for the caregivers it that are working at these places. And we have to look at new models. I think we have to really think about how we're going to do nursing homes in the future.

MG: I'm so glad that your father has been declared COVID-free.

DEBRA DREW: Thank you very much.

MG: It's a great pleasure to talk to you, Debra. Thank you.

DEBRA DREW: Thank you very much.

MG: Debra Drew's dad is a resident at the Lynn Valley Care Centre in North Vancouver. It was tested positive for COVID-19 and as you heard, has now been declared COVID-free. Laura Tamblyn Watts is the chief executive of CanAge. It's a national seniors advocacy agency. She's been listening in. Laura, good morning to you.

LAURA TAMBLYN WATTS: Good morning.

MG: What do you make of what you've heard from Sarah describing the conditions at the Pine Crest home in Bobcaygeon to what Debra Drew has gone through in terms of helping out people in the Lynn Valley Care Centre in North Vancouver because the staffing was inadequate.

LAURA TAMBLYN WATTS: It's just the beginning. And while, I can say that the whole long term care sector has come together to provide support as you do all that they can, this situation is dire.

MG: Debra said that in many ways, and perhaps it's no fault of those who are in and around the centres, but that the centres themselves, the residences are unprepared for what's coming their way and what's happening right now. Would you agree with that?

LAURA TAMBLYN WATTS: I do agree. The staffing levels were too low to begin with, and that was the conversation we've been having. And now in a crisis, you hear that the long term care homes are really trying to plan for 50 percent or less in terms of their staffing levels. So the situation for trying to get the care that they need, let alone the other types of social programs, is still important for emotion. Focussed care are really, really under strain.

MG: You've described the residents of those facilities and the facilities themselves, some ways as a tinderbox when it comes to this pandemic. What is it that makes those care homes so vulnerable to an illness like COVID-19?

LAURA TAMBLYN WATTS: Long-Term Care is ground zero for COVID-19, not just in Canada but around the world. In order to qualify for long term care, you need the level of frailty which is so high that it makes you the most vulnerable population for this illness. People there have underlying conditions, health and lung conditions. Obviously, they may have other type of cognitive impairments in some long term care homes. Cognitive impairment can be up to 80 or 90 percent. So compliance with hand-washing and other types of personal self-care that we're asking the general population just can't be done by people in long term care without assistance. And you have people who work in a multitude of care facility settings, staff going from place to place and community and back again into long term care. It really is the centre of this epidemic.

MG: We're also, I mean, we're learning overnight that two more deaths were reported at Pine Crest. That brings the total to eleven. Sarah was describing how residents are in ward situations where they're separated by a curtain, if that. That's, I think, alarming to a lot of people. How does something like that happen?

LAURA TAMBLYN WATTS: You know, our long term care system wasn't even set up for who we had already in our population, and I want to agree with our last caller who said that we need to rethink long term care in its physicality as well as how we deliver care.

MG: What does that mean? Rethink that?

LAURA TAMBLYN WATTS: Well, we need to make sure that we're taking out of these sort of open kind of hospital ward type settings that we think about the 1950s and 60s, where you have large groups of people in groups of four but or two and without too much in terms of demarcation between rooms, curtains don't provide that level of protective balance that you need. And we need to rethink it to make sure that it's a place where people live. It used to be a place where people went to for a few months before they died when it was originally planned. Now people are living in long term care for decades. Endemic is really going to show us that we need to rethink how we build and we need to rethink how we deliver service.

MG: We heard the premier of Ontario at the beginning of our conversation talking about building sort of an iron ring around those long term care facilities. What do you make of what the province is doing?

LAURA TAMBLYN WATTS: They're taking the steps that are needed. It is, however, worrying because the emergency powers that have been given in long term care to quite rightly face this pandemic also has risks as well. So people say, what's the solution? The solution is we all try to lean in and do as much as we can. But because the staffing shortages and the technical requirements for keeping track of wellness are being put to the side for a while, of course, you're weighing off the degree of care and expertise on the one end with the fact that there is nobody else unless they backfill with care aides and volunteers on the other.

MG: There's also been a greater call for transparency that we actually don't know, perhaps the real numbers in terms of the number of people who might be infected in those long term care homes.

LAURA TAMBLYN WATTS: We absolutely don't know the numbers.

MG: In many cases, people are only being tested up to about three cases per long term care home, and after that, people are at presumptive risks. So when you look at the data of who's infected, you can multiply that data. Or as a friend of mine who works in geriatric says, if a couple people have it, everyone has it.

MG: So what if a couple of people have it, everyone has it. You can imagine that family members would hear that and would panic if they have parents or grandparents, aunts and uncles in those residences. What would you say to them about how best to support their family members now?

LAURA TAMBLYN WATTS: When it comes to the personal care, we're all leaning in and the sector is really trying to help the long term care association advocates. Family councils, Ontario Residents Councils are all trying to do the same thing. And we're creating toolkits that we're launching as early as today, which will help family members do wellness checks with their loved one, whether it be done remotely or whether it be done through conversations with whoever they can talk to within long term care. So getting that same information and practical tips on how to visit and how to check in is, I think, the best thing that they can possibly do. They should understand it's going to be a very, very difficult time and you should understand that the long term care home sector is trying to do everything it can.

MG: Laura, good to speak with you about this. Thank you.

DEBRA DREW: Thank you.

MG: Laura Tamblyn Watts is a seniors advocate in Toronto. Would love to hear from you if you find yourself in this situation, the one described by Debra Drew or by Sarah Gardiner. You can reach us your experience with long term care facilities in the midst of this pandemic. Email us at thecurrent@cbc.ca or go to the website cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the Contact link. The CBC News is next and then we're going to talk about isolation and the mental and emotional effects of all of that isolation on all of us. That's coming up in about six minutes time. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to an extended edition of The Current on CBC Radio One. Stay with us.

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As physical distancing expands amid COVID-19 pandemic, some worry about a social recession

Guests: Sue Carter, James Coan, Ami Rokach

MG: Hello, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

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MG: Coming up in about half an hour's time, health reporter Andre Picard will be here with updates on our coughing elephants to the south. Those are his words, not mine. We'll talk more about what's happening in the United States and why we should be concerned in Canada. But first, it's an impulse that lives deep inside your brain. Like it or not, you are wired for social connection.

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MG: In the summer of 2014, Jason Rezain was working as the Iran bureau chief for The Washington Post. And that is when he was suddenly accused of espionage by the Iranian regime. He and his wife were arrested and he spent 544 days in solitary confinement. Last week, Jason shared some advice on how to cope in isolation.

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VOICE: You have the choice, the choice to be your own worst enemy or your own best friend. It seems like an obvious decision to be a friend to yourself, but a lot of us will work against that current until we realize that doing so is untenable. You have to figure out a way to really embrace the voice inside your head and use it as an advantage because in a in a situation where you're deprived of so many of the normal things that you're used to and not only your social interactions, you have to improvise.

MG: Learning how to cope with sudden alone time is becoming crucial these days. The emotional physiological toll of social isolation can be so intense. At least one neuroscientist has described it as a death sentence for people living alone. Physical distancing from loved ones can be particularly hazardous. Sue Carter is a journalist and the editor of Quil & Quire magazine and right now, she's living alone in Toronto. Sue, good morning.

SUE CARTER: Good morning. I do the cat with me. So I have some comfort.

MG: Not entirely alone then. How are you and the cat doing?

SUE CARTER: I'm in her space. She knows where her food is. She's figured out how to open that cupboard. So if something happens to me, she's taken care of, but I don't know if she's ever going to be the best caregiver, but she's definitely like just a pure delight to have around. So I'm really grateful for that.

MG: That's the cat. What about you? How are you coping?

SUE CARTER: I'm okay. I'm really well connected with a lot of friends and family and yeah, with Quil & Quire, we just figured out how to put a magazine together completely remotely. So that was taking up a lot of space. I've discovered that I know what things I can't read that I have to kind of go hour by hour in any discussion about I might say this last thing to October, I discovered that that's really upsetting and I can't think about that. You know, it's really just managing my time sort of, you know, day by day.

MG: You're living by yourself, but you do have a long term partner.

SUE CARTER: I do and it feels very long distance right now, because I'm in the junction in Toronto and he's in central Toronto. So it feels very far away, even though it's only really like a 25 minute subway ride away.

MG: Why did you decide to isolate separately and not together?

SUE CARTER: Well, we lived separately anyway. So I think it would have been a real imposition for either of us to do that. And also, I think at the time, everybody thought that this is going to be a two week thing and that, you know, life is gonna go back to normal, which is seems silly now. But yeah, there was never really any discussion. It was just I came home from work on the Friday and hunkered down and that was it, and so now it feels like a new reality.

MG: And so do you regret that, given how long this could go on for?

SUE CARTER: I don't know if I regret it. I think that I can't stop and think about those sorts of things. It's just it's just really trying to find new ways of connecting. So, for instance, I on the weekend, I cleaned my bike off. And by the way, if you have Diet Coke in aluminium foil, it will clean rust off with the bike, which is disgusting.

MG: The things you learn when you're spending a lot of time by yourself.

SUE CARTER: Exactly. You have to be resourceful. But I was able to borrow a bicycle pump that friends kindly lent on on our porch so I could go get that pick it up. And so now at least maybe we can meet on a bike ride where we have that safe distance that we're moving and and being as safe as possible to do that. So that would be a wonderful way of connecting.

MG: One of the things that we're hearing from a lot of people is that this is an uncertain time for a number of reasons, in part because this virus spreads so quickly and so easily and people wonder whether they'll get sick. What do you think about in terms of the possibility being by yourself and maybe getting ill?

SUE CARTER: You know, it's sort of again for like for the first week or so, it wasn't really a thought that that would happen and that's become quickly the reality. And yeah, I started getting really scared about that. And but that was when I started having more conversations with friends. So, for instance, I had a four hour Skype chat with a dear friend the other night. And we talked about the fact that maybe we should, you know, introduce by email our parents and try and maybe get each other's keys and start having a little bit more of those serious conversation.

MG: If you were asked to stay home for another several weeks or even months, what will you do to stay sane, to not get lost inside yourself?

SUE CARTER: Yeah, again, I try not to think that far.

MG: You and me both. Yeah.

SUE CARTER: Absolutely. I've been setting small goals for myself, so I haven't been tried to schedule anything at really far in advance because or set any really lofty goals like my closet. Still a mess, but I cleaned up my kitchen covered last night. So just trying to do really small things like that. I've been doing a lot of online dance lessons, so my tap dancing is getting pretty good. The floor looks terrible, but isn't there hope? You know, just trying to find new skills or at least the things where I can see improvement.

MG: What do you miss?

SUE CARTER: Oh, my goodness. I miss a lot. I mean, the other thing I can't any time I'm looking on Twitter and somebody starts talking about the last time they hug somebody, I just shut that down. I don't like thinking about that. That's a really, really hard one that, you know, hugging, holding hands, those sorts of things. But eating meals with another person is a really big deal. I love to cook. And, you know, you can only do so much batch cooking for yourself. So I think, like, yeah, just a sort of small communal things or even like the incidental conversation like with a barista, you know, in the morning, those sorts of things.

MG: When they happen again and they will they will seem even more meaningful. In the meantime, good luck with the tap dancing.

SUE CARTER: Thank you very much and thanks for covering this.

MG: Sue Carter is a journalist and editor. She's living alone in Toronto. Many of us are already feeling that mental and emotional strain of social isolation. It's meant to be physical distancing, not social isolation, but what happens when you're stuck alone on your by your own is that you end up feeling like you're out on your own. The physiological strain is something that my next guest worries a lot about. James Coan is a neuroscientist with the University of Virginia. He's been listening in. Jim, good morning to you.

JAMES COAN: Good morning.

MG: If you think of Sue Carter and what she was just describing, just briefly, what is going on physiologically in her brain and her body right now as she's by herself?

JAMES COAN: Well, I mean, what she's feeling in terms of her discomfort is her brain mounting a stress response, a threat response. And our brains ... have been shaped by natural selection and evolution to do just that when we're isolated involuntarily.

MG: And so this is just a couple of weeks into isolation, what are the long term implications of this? If this goes on, the physical distancing goes on for not just weeks, but perhaps months?

JAMES COAN: Well, that all depends on how effectively Sue is able to manage her stress. If she's continuing to mount a robust stress response or threat response during that entire time, her body will experience what we call weathering.

MG: What does that mean? She'll know what that means is. Now think of it. Think of your body as a house that you own and you own a house. You have to maintenance it regularly. Just so we have to maintenance our body regularly. We have to grow hair and, you know, build up our immune system and, you know, make blood and on and on and on. These are things that we do with these. These things take energy and attention. But when we mount a stress response, we divert resources away from those sort of ongoing maintenance projects and and apply them leverage that energy toward responding to an emergency. That's great. That's that's how we've survived for all of the time that we've been a species. But when that stress is chronic and it can start to, you know, you're never fixing your leaky roof, you're never attending to you know, that the flaws that are getting slowly damaged by her tap dancing, et cetera. You know the thing is. when the house is burning down, it's the wrong time to work on your leaky roof. But if you're constantly worried that your house is going to burn down, you never work on your leaky roof and the leak gets bigger and bigger.

MG: So what's the body's equivalent of the leaky roof?

JAMES COAN: The body's equivalent, great question, is that your immune system will slowly degrade. One of the most expensive things that your body can do is mount an immune response. It costs a lot of metabolic money, if you will. And so the body can use the immune system sort of like a bank account for short term loans on energy to mount an emergency response. But if it keeps doing that, the immune system gets underpaid and under-resourced. And here we are facing a pandemic. So one of my concerns is that chronic stress is not only going to feel unpleasant, but will actually potentially lead us to being more vulnerable.

MG: We hear a lot about the economic recession that this pandemic has created, but there's this term, the social recession that's being thrown around as well. What does that mean?

JAMES COAN: What that means is that we are facing a long period of time where our basic portion of our bit, body and brains, basic nutrition is is not available to us in quantities that we need. And I really think that we need to think of our social worlds as part of our nutrition or part of our hygiene. We need social hygiene. We need social nutrition. We need to spend time with other people, and of course, we can't physically right now. But we can divert our attention more mindfully towards being with other people through electronic media and so forth. Now, those are not going to be a satisfying, as Sue mentioned. You know, she she has a hard time even thinking about the absence of hugs and that's because touch is one of the most important things that we get to experience socially. It really matters to our brains that we get touched, but there are other options that are not necessarily exactly as good, but there are a lot better than just talking to each other on social media.

MG: Can you talk just briefly about the touch because you're doing research into hand-holding.

JAMES COAN: Yes. My own research looks at the effect of hand-holding on the brain. And what we find is that when people are able to hold hands with someone they know and trust and love, their brain is not only not mounting a ordinary stress response just to being alone, but even when we stress the brain out, when we put people under threat of mild electric shock. The brain doesn't seem to respond as much. So touch is a fantastic way to help manage your stress. And more recently, we've even found some colleagues of mine and I have found that touch simple hand-holding can actually decrease the amount of pain you feel. So touch goes right to the basics of our physiology.

MG: And again, Sue talked about the four hour Skype chat. We have technology that allows us to connect with people in ways that would have been unimaginable five years ago. Ten years ago, we would have perhaps never used them in this way two weeks ago. That is a sense of connection. But you're suggesting that it doesn't go anywhere near close enough to to what our bodies used to and what our body requires.

JAMES COAN: Well, what we've learned is that our brain processes in-person interaction and certainly touch differently than it processes electronically mediated interaction. Because these electronic things are just not we didn't evolve with them. We have to sort of think about what we're doing a lot of the time instead of just doing it when we're talking to someone through Skype or through Zoom. That said, there are ways to overcome this. That I think are worth exploring. Like what? If you like, like, for example, one of the key things one of the key reasons, not the only reason or one of the key reasons that touches so effective is that it's intimate. So if you think it's intimate and it's vulnerable, one of the things that we need to think about is how to be more intimate and vulnerable via electronic meansaAnd no, I'm not talking about things like phone sex, which is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about being vulnerable with each other in terms of expressing our feelings, creating art, writing poetry, writing songs, singing to each other. These are things that may seem ridiculous right now because we don't do them very often. But if we're seeking that connection that feeds us, what we need to do is is show are the oldest parts of our brain that we have a connection with someone who's close and in a bond that's rare and important. And we do that by letting down our guard, by yielding our efforts to the social systems that we create. And we can do that by being vulnerable and creative.

MG: Sue Carter, you've been listening into this. Are you encouraged by what Jim has been saying? I don't know, maybe you need to do the tap dancing for an audience or something like that through Zoom or through Skype.

SUE CARTER: Oh, I'm not there yet. I am very far from that point, but I do understand and I find that the tenor of the conversations that I've been having, I think have been moving more toward, you know, finding those ways as sharing those kinds of emotions that perhaps we wouldn't have in the past. So, yeah, everything you're saying completely makes sense to me.

MG: Jim, just before I let you go, is there concern, very briefly, is there concern about long term damage from from what's happening right now? We can talk about the economy in the long term damage, but what about our emotional economy?

JAMES COAN: Well, the main thing I'm concerned about is the sort of weathering that I've talked about with our bodies, if there's more mounting a long term stress response. But the other thing that I do worry about is our youngest and obviously our oldest. So there are social needs that are more pronounced among children and elderly. Elderly tend to have smaller social networks from whom they depend more. And so there's a lot that needs to be addressed there, especially given that the elderly are particularly isolated on purpose right now to protect them from the virus. But we also need to think about young children. Young children are cut off in many ways from their peer networks and those peer networks that make up how children play and learn they're essential for cognitive and emotional development. So we have to really think of creative ways to overcome that for them.

MG: Jim, thank you for this.

JAMES COAN: Thank you.

MG: And Sue, thanks again.

SUE CARTER: Thank you.

MG: Sue Carter, a journalist living alone in Toronto. James Coan is a neuroscientist at the University of Virginia. All this isolation, as you heard, has mental health professionals worried about loneliness settling in. Clinical psychologist Ami Rokach also sees hope in these strange and difficult times. He's at home in Toronto. Good morning to you.

AMI ROKACH: Good morning, Matt.

MG: We talked a lot about loneliness. In clinical terms, how would you describe it?

AMI ROKACH: OK. There are some there are some concepts that I would like to clarify. First of all, loneliness is very painful. We never choose to be lonely. And when people talk about loneliness, they usually refer to being alone. However, we can be with other people, even a loving family, and feel lonely and uncared for. Of course, the most pain for loneliness is loneliness of people who are in intimate relationships. Now when we talk about being alone, we could experience solitude, which is a situation where versus loneliness we choose to be alone. Gebe mentioned a bit of it to do what we can do alone. Tap dance read creagan is called many, many large, big important literary creations were done during solitude. And when we are in a situation like we are now, a lot of it has to do with the way we look at it. I got, this morning, a sign on my e-mail that said 'You're not stuck at home, you're safe at home.' And that's what I want to talk about, how to turn the lemon into a lemonade.

MG: OK. So give us the lemonade because most people just see a basket of lemons right now.

AMI ROKACH: Yes, I understand. I think that the virus is really a gift to us in the Western culture. When was the last time that we went outside? I'm talking about those of us who can do it and walked the streets and people are saying hello to each other, which is new for Toronto in general. The sky is blue again. There is no air pollution. You can you can start to hear the birds. I mean the whole world is changing and it's changing for the better.

MG: Well it's changing, but it also is changing with huge consequences. I mean, I think there are people who would say it's nice that people are saying hello to each other, but the effect, the reason that that's happening is because there are terrible things that are happening.

AMI ROKACH: Yes, of course. But I'm talking about the way that each of us can cope with this situation and not necessarily experience what Jim talked about, the huge stress that comes with loneliness and with being worried we can take a given situation and make you feel something which is very different. And people are talking about being lonely. And it's interesting. Loneliness has a stigma tweet. And this statement goes like that If I'm lonely. That means that nobody wants to be with me. Nobody wants to be with me because I'm not good enough. And therefore, I'm going to hide the fact that I'm alone. And interestingly enough, now, people very openly say I'm lonely for as long as the reason is not me, I don't have to hide behind it and I can say, yes, that's because of the virus.

MG: Give me another example of something that would provide hope in the midst of this, where people feel isolated, where people feel secluded and they can't not even holding hands. They can't hug somebody that they love, that they know on the street. They can't be out and do the social things that we're used to doing. Where's the hope that comes out of that?

AMI ROKACH: First of all, as Jim mentioned already, our communication could become much more meaningful. We can be more open with each other, something that usually many, many people don't do. The second thing, just like it's not all that bad to experience hunger for time to time. And and we come to appreciate food and taste it again. It is OK, in my humble opinion, to to miss the hugs, to miss the talking and touching people. It's a reminder that these are really the important things usually in everyday life. We run and we want to achieve. We want to impress and we want to accumulate possessions. And now when when things are tough, we're looking for other people. And one of the hopeful thing is that, yes, we can not hack people, but we can connect with them. For instance, I live in a subdivision where were many elderly live and those that I know every time I go for a walk, I knock on their door and we talk through the glass door. And that does make good money for sure, that's then good.

MG: Do you think that there will be long term change that comes out of this? People are already and we have no idea when this is going to end, but people are already starting to speculate about how we'll be different at the end of this. Do you see that being a permanent change?

AMI ROKACH: I wish, but I'm afraid that we tend to forget very quickly and the lessons that we're getting now about how wonderful it is to do things in a different way, to connect with people in a different manner, I'm concerned. I mean, that the media does a good job in highlighting the also the positive about the situation, but I'm concerned that when we go back we'll right away after a very short time, get lost in what we did always.

MG: So in the remaining, we just have under a minute or so left, what can we do to preserve that? What can we do to keep to keep that that in and not take that sense of connection for granted?

AMI ROKACH: I think that the most important thing is to see the situation as maybe less convenient than what I want, but, it's an opportunity. It's an opportunity to learn something about myself, about other people, and learn how to connect with people in a way. I mean, we have a lot of control. As far as who is going to connect with us. And when I connect with people, I think to myself, well, it's really fun to connect with them, but I want to do it in such a way that they will benefit from it as well and they would want to stay in touch with me. It's going to be beneficial for everyone. Another thing is to remind ourselves that, look, I'm stuck at home. I'm alone. But I just like so I can I can make all kinds of good out of it. I can really benefit. I can see the benefit in being by myself and seeing the resources that I have to cope with the situation.

MG: I hope people take that to heart. Ami Rokach it's good to speak with you. Thank you.

AMI ROKACH: My pleasure.

MG: Ami Rokach is a clinical psychologist and professor at York University in Toronto. Coming up in about 90 seconds, Andre Picard is a health columnist for The Globe and Mail. He's warning us about the coughing elephants to the south of us and what we need to be aware of now that the United States is the epicentre of this pandemic. He's next. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current. Stay with us.

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'Totally irresponsible' to expose yourself to COVID-19 in hopes of immunity, warns immunologist

Guests: Andre Picard, Jeanette Boudreau

MG: Hi, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. Are you feeling restless right now? I am. And it's not just because we're being cooped up in our houses and apartments. We're eager to know if all of our efforts are paying off, if Canada is actually starting to flatten the curve. This week could be crucial to understanding what is actually going on. Andre Picard is a health columnist with The Globe and Mail and one of this country's leading public health voices. Andre, good morning to you.

ANDRE PICARD: Good morning.

MG: Dr. Theresa Tam, the chief public health officer for this country, has described this week as critical in the fight against colvard 19. Why is this week so important, do you think?

ANDRE PICARD: Well there's a couple reasons. We're gonna get a sense this week if that famous flattening of the curve is starting to happen. So everybody knows that expression now. But the reason it's now is we've had these isolation measures, self social distancing measures in place for her roughly two weeks, depending on where you live in the country. So we're going to have to start to get our first glimmer of whether they're working. And then the other aspect of it is we've closed down a lot of travel, especially from the U.S. where a lot of our costs were coming from. So we're going to see if that's having an impact. So now we have you know, it's spreading in the community. It's not coming in from elsewhere. So that gives us a chance to figure out if we're controlling it within the country.

MG: There's been some early data that's come out of British Columbia that seems to be positive. Is that a hint of what we might be seeing?

ANDRE PICARD: It's maybe a hint or it's maybe a blip. You know, when the B.C. officials were asked about that, Bonnie Henry said, hopeful, no, I'm not going to use the word hopeful because it's too soon for that. So it's going to go up and down. Paradoxically, right now, in the last couple of days, we've seen the largest increases in Ontario, in Quebec, in Alberta, all of them in the last two days. But that's maybe telling us that we're reaching a peak and after that, it's going to go down. So the numbers are, the numbers game is always dangerous.

MG: Well, in part because we don't actually know and you've talked about this before, we don't actually know what the numbers really are. CBC was reporting yesterday that the number of COVID-19 cases in ICUs is actually higher than official figures. How accurate are the numbers that we're dealing with right now?

ANDRE PICARD: Yeah confirmed numbers are one thing. And we're again, we're concentrating on travellers. We're concentrating on people with symptoms. So that gives us a snapshot of an important population. But we don't know what's going on in the in the real world, in the community. And that's going to be crucial to figure that out if everyone's already infected, that's actually a good thing, because we're going to be immune. If only a few people are infected, we have a chance of another wave coming if we back off on our social distancing.

MG: There are real concerns about what's happening in seniors residences and nursing homes. We were talking earlier in the program about the outbreak at Ontario and Ontario Nursing Home. It's led to at least 11 deaths. What alarms you the most about that?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, we wrote about this. I wrote about this very early on. That's the nightmare scenario. You don't want this new bug going into an area where people are very vulnerable. So nursing homes are always a red alert and now we have maybe two dozen nursing homes in Canada with outbreaks. I was reading this morning 500 nursing homes in the U.S. This is where deaths will happen on a large scale. And this is really, really worrisome. And it's very difficult to stop once it gets into this community, this population, it spreads easily. And where can you put them? If you put them in a hospital, it's actually even worse. So it's a very, very difficult scenario and it could get very, very ugly.

MG: Is there anything the governments can do? The premier of Ontario talked about putting an iron ring around those seniors residences, but is there anything that the government can do if the situation is as dire as the reporting suggests?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, there's not a lot we can do. We've stopped a lot of movement in and out of those homes for a couple of weeks now. Probably we do need an iron ring. Actually, no movement in or out. There's a real fundamental staffing issue there. People who work in those homes, that thankless work, it's poorly paid work and people tend to juggle jobs in two or three facilities. And that's we've seen in B.C. what really facilitated the spread to different homes was employees getting infected and low wage employees who can't afford not to work. It's a thankless situation.

MG: Let's talk a little bit about what you've been writing about when it comes to the United States. The U.S. is now the epicentre of that pandemic. The cliche is that when the elephant coughs, we catch a cold. How concerned should we be about what's happening south of the border?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, I think we really have to worry, because there's some concerning things going on there when we see a hospital in New York get overwhelmed and incapable of dealing with patients. You have to think what will happen in Canada where we don't have the extra capacity they have there. So it's a lot of cautionary tales to start off with. And then we have to remember that's where most of the movement happens. Indians and Americans travel back and forth over that border by the millions every week. So that is really lends itself to a spread. Technically, our borders closed, but there's still a lot of movement. We have to have food. We have to have medical goods. We have people who work on either side of the border. There's a interesting issue unfolding in Windsor where a lot of Windsor workers have travel to Detroit to work. Now we're seeing a huge outbreak in Windsor says all kinds of issues that have to remember most of us to more than two thirds of Canadians live within spitting distance of the border, less than 100 kilometres. So whatever happens there is going to have a real impact on us. No matter how good we are at controlling our own spread, domestically, there's going to be spill-over.

MG: Well we see how alarming the situation is, not just in New York. You mentioned in Detroit. We talked yesterday in the program about what's happening in Florida, in Colorado, in other jurisdictions. You wrote that we could very well be on a similar trajectory to what's happening in the United States. How so?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, sadly, if you looked at the data, that's what it tells us, that we're having the same unfolding of the numbers and the doubling ratio that's happening. We're doubling every three days, roughly in Canada, the same as the U.S., same as Italy. So nothing tells us that we're not going there. There's no sort of glimmer of hope there, at least yet. So that's why everybody's so fixated on can we flatten it a bit? And people have to remember, flattening the curve doesn't mean we're going to stop transmission. What it means is we're going to slow it down so that our hospitals don't get overwhelmed, but eventually there's going to be big numbers. But you just don't want them all at once.

MG: We've seen and I think it's fair to call it frustrating, frustration from the premiers of Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, Newfoundland, talking about how people perhaps are not taking to heart the idea of physical distancing. Spring has arrived and people have been out in parks and in ravines and along waterfronts. What will it take to truly bring that to the forefront, to get people to take it seriously? Is it going to take further guidance or do you expect, you've talked about bringing the hammer down. Do you expect further action from those leaders to try to limit where people can be?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, I think we've seen in the last week we've seen this escalation of threats and we've seen the escalation of rules. You know, Ontario said yesterday nobody over 70 should leave the house period, I connected than a week ago. So I think you're going to see, especially if that kerb doesn't. You're going to see more strict rules. You're going to see more policing. But we can't police ourselves out of this. You know, you can't have a police officer in the front of the homes of 36 million people. It really has to be about personal accountability, et cetera. And I hope everybody hopes that it doesn't come to where where where Italy, where we have to have a quarantine, which means no one leaves the house under any circumstances. But how did it come to that when it came to that because they started having thousands of people a day dying and no one wants to go there. So I think we have to count on the Canadians to make these personal sacrifices to realize that, yeah, this is inconvenient for me, but it's way better than the alternative.

MG: And just finally, the people who are often making those calls for the sacrifice are those who are working on the frontlines. Health care workers, doctors, nurses, people who are in hospitals, in long term care homes, working in private practice. What do you want us in the midst of this to remember about them and what they're up against?

ANDRE PICARD: Well, you know, I talk to a lot of health care workers and their frustrations and their fears. And I think the most important messages, most of them are very committed to their work. They recognise the risk. And one of them said yesterday, you know, don't you're not trapped in your home. You're safe in your home. I go and I put myself in the line of fire every day. Realize that you're lucky to be at home stuck there. So I think that's the message we should all take.

MG: Andre, great to talk to you, as always. Thank you.

ANDRE PICARD: Thank you.

MG: Andre Picard is the Global Mail's health columnist. We'll check in with him regularly in the weeks ahead.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Hi there, my name's Katie Lewis and I live in Vancouver. So when I was a kid growing up in Victoria, my parents sent me to a chicken pox party with the idea that my brother and I would get chickenpox and just get it over with. So they sent us across to the neighbor's house. They were twins and they were like four years older than us and very, very cool. So we were really psyched to go over there for a whole day. So we spend the whole day there and in the end, it didn't work. And I ended up getting chicken pox three times, which apparently is quite rare. I had it when I was seven, when I was in high school and again in university. And I also had a case of shingles in there. But, you know, it was the 80s and it really was a terrible idea. So it's kind of something to reflect on now and laugh about, but hopefully we don't make the same mistakes again.

MG: That's Vancouver's Katie Lewis. A little reminder of how wrong people can be when they take science and medicine into their own hands. It is not clear whether anyone has deliberately exposed themselves to the coronavirus in order to develop resistance, but a lot of people are wondering about the prospects for immunity from the infection and whether that comes from exposure or from a vaccine. We will not trust folk wisdom on these important questions. Instead, we'll turn to Jeanette Boudreau, who's an immunologist and associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Dalhousie University. Jeanette, good morning to you.

JEANETTE BOUDREAU: Good morning, Matt. Thanks for having me.

MG: Thanks for joining us. This is a question that we are asked constantly. I'm going to ask it to you. What do we know about people who have recovered from COVID-19? Are they immune against further infection?

JEANETTE BOUDREAU: So we don't know for sure. It's a brand new virus. The likelihood is that the answer to the question is yes, because that is what happens with other coronaviruses, and for that matter, all the other viruses that we know of out there. There's actually some clinical trials starting up in the states right now that are aiming at transferring some of that immunity from people who have been exposed and infected and recovered, to try to help to protect people from getting severe forms of the infection.

MG: But we do not want people, as Katie was describing, to go and hang out with other people, perhaps who have coronavirus, just to develop that immunity.

JEANETTE BOUDREAU: No, absolutely not. That's a terrible idea. We saw early on in this outbreak that it was the elderly and the immunocompromised that seem to be at greatest risk. But as time is moving forward, we're seeing more and more that people who are otherwise in excellent health are ending up in hospitals. Our healthcare systems are already overwhelmed as it is with the outbreak that's happening naturally. So it's totally irresponsible to go out and try to get infected. Not to mention that you have no idea how you as an individual — health care workers and scientists don't know what makes one person more susceptible to severe infection compared to people who are having a relatively mild course.

MG: How do researchers go about establishing whether somebody is now immune?

JEANETTE BOUDREAU: The test that we most often do for a virus, what we're measuring is for a protein in the blood called an antibody. Antibodies are made by the immune system after it's been trained to see a particular pathogen. So in this case, something from coronavirus. And so we can take the coronavirus itself, we can break it down into its proteins and see whether we have reactive antibodies. So it's just a simple blood test and we look to see whether those antibodies are present or not. What we know scientifically is that those antibodies are important for neutralizing the virus. So they keep the virus from being able to infect new cells. What we don't know yet is the quality of those antibodies. So in other infections, chicken pox is a great example. Some people have antibodies that are really fantastic and other ones have antibodies that probably, in Katie's case, don't work as well as they could. So maybe they help to make the infection that would otherwise be really severe more mild, but they still might not protect. The other piece that we don't know is how long the protection is going to last. So for things like SARS coronavirus, which was pretty severe, that immunity seems to be pretty strong, on the order of a few years. For the more garden-variety coronaviruses that we get and just sort of shrug off as colds, it only lasts for a year or two. So we don't know how long and persistent this protection is going to be yet either.

MG: There's a couple of interesting things in that. I was reading about researchers in New York who say that they are almost ready to try transferring COVID-19 antibodies into patients who are critically ill with the infection. Is that because they think, to your point, that maybe there is the possibility that those antibodies could help neutralize the virus?

JEANETTE BOUDREAU: That's exactly it. This is something that worked in the Ebola outbreak, most recently in 2014-2015. And so essentially what they're doing is giving these patients a shortcut. It takes about a week to make your own antibodies, but if you can get the antibodies on site earlier, maybe they can stop the virus from infecting more and more cells, and causing more and more damage, and get people sort of over that hump.

MG: The other part of this is the hope that some people have, that people who recover from COVID-19, assuming even if they have some sort of temporary immunity, that they would have some role in helping society battle the spread of coronavirus. What could that role be?

JEANETTE BOUDREAU: So that I think speaks to something we call herd immunity. So if you think about the population as a herd — and that's not a term I invented, but if you think about the population as a group, the virus can't move itself around, right? It depends on people to transmit it from person to person, it can't make more copies of itself unless it's infected somebody's cells. So the more people that you have in a population that are resistant to the virus, that act as kind of a shield for the virus, the better. So if 50 or 90 per cent of your population is already immune, the virus doesn't have anywhere to go because it can't be passed down that chain from person to person.

MG: There were a number of countries that at least temporarily floated the idea of fighting COVID-19, not through isolation, not through physical distancing, but through herd immunity. When you heard that, what went through your mind?

JEANETTE BOUDREAU: Oh, my gosh. That's a terrible idea.

MG: I mean like the prime minister of Britain was one of the people who suggested this.

JEANETTE BOUDREAU: I mean, in theory it's a good idea and that's actually what we're trying to accomplish with vaccines. But the big difference between vaccination versus intentional infection, is that a vaccine is designed to train the immune system and get them to the point where they have those protective antibodies, without ever actually putting the person at risk. So it sort of tricks the immune system into thinking it's infected, but with a version of the virus that can't actually propagate itself or make copies of itself inside of a person. And so when you look at things like chicken pox or measles, the things that we have really effective vaccines for, we're able to achieve herd immunity by vaccinating the entire population without actually putting them at risk for infection. To intentionally infect people with coronavirus would put a lot of people at risk. And since we don't know who's going to become really infected and our hospitals are already at or over capacity, you could end up with a scenario where you actually exacerbate the problem. The researchers are working on various forms of the coronavirus vaccine and I think it's probably prudent to wait for that.

MG: We had a question yesterday when we were taking questions from kids and it was about virus mutation. If you are trying to get to a point of immunity, how does the mutation of the virus affect that?

JEANETTE BOUDREAU: It depends on how the virus itself is mutating. So there are components of the virus that are easier to mutate than others. So there's parts that are critical. So they have to do with how the virus actually makes copies of itself or how the virus attaches to cells and enters it. And there's a lot of pressure on the virus to not change those. Those are what you want to mount an immune response against, but of course our immune system doesn't know what that is. If the virus mutates in a way that allows it to escape the immune recognition, then the immune system has to go back to the beginning and start over with a new response.

MG: You mentioned the vaccine and there's been a lot of talk about different approaches to try to develop a vaccine or perhaps use existing things that that might work in this different scenario. How hopeful are you when you hear of that research and those gains?

JEANETTE BOUDREAU: I'm actually very hopeful about those. So I think the first wave that we're going to see is safe for the people to get infected and recover. It is a wave where we're not necessarily having a vaccine. A vaccine is going to take about a year and a half to develop, but we'll repurpose things that already exist. So existing antivirals or these antibody transfers where you're not necessarily making a person immune, but you're getting them through that infection by controlling the virus. So you're essentially helping the immune system by making the challenge less of a challenge. In the long run, I think we will end up with a vaccine. I know of at least five different approaches being taken by different groups around the world. All of those approaches in principle work. They've worked for vaccines for other other viral infections, they've worked in animal models, the only kind of catch is that we haven't figured out how to make them work for COVID-19 yet. And that, again, just speaks to the fact that it's a brand new virus. So really what they need to do is sort of change exactly what the viruses and coding or the vaccine is encoding and I think we'll be off to the races.

MG: But this is a long game. And so for people, just finally in the last few seconds that we have who might be complacent when it comes to that idea of physical distancing, what would you as an immunologist say to them?

JEANETTE BOUDREAU: I would say physical distancing is the closest thing that we have to herd immunity right now. So I spoke a little bit about how we want to limit the ability of a virus to circulate in a population because the virus can't move itself. So if you make it so that the virus can't get to its next host by staying far apart from each other, then you really are doing something that's important to buy us the time we need to make the vaccines and figure out how to treat this.

MG: This has been so helpful. Jeannette, I appreciate it. Thank you.

JEANETTE BOUDREAU: Thank you.

MG: Jeanette Boudreau is an immunologist and associate professor at Dalhousie University.

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MG: This is The Current on CBC Radio One. My name is Matt Galloway. An extended edition of The Current with special guests, including one Tom Power, the host of Q. Tom, good morning.

TOM POWER: Matt, how are you? I'm actually broadcasting from home today.

MG: Are you wearing pyjamas?

TOM POWER: I am. I got dressed, however, I have been stressed on air before, like we all have. I have never been stressed that my cat is gonna meow on air before. So if he starts yowling, I don't know what to tell you.

MG: What's your cat's name?

TOM POWER: Chapman.

MG: There's a story behind that. We don't have time to get into it.

TOM POWER: Well, his name is Sobeys. But when we got him, we called him Sobeys. But when we got him from Lady Bird Animal Sanctuary in Hamilton, his name was Chapman and he comes to it. He's a very smart cat, Mat, what can I say?

MG: A smart cat, indeed. You have not here to talk about cats. You're here to talk about a story from the arts that doesn't get a whole lot of attention when it comes to people who perhaps are taking a real hit from the coronavirus.

TOM POWER: We've been talking about actors. We've been talking about musicians, but we haven't been talking about drag queens. They don't actually qualify for a lot of the social assistance programs that are being put in place. So I got talking to Brooke Lynn Hytes. You might know her from the show RuPaul's Drag Race.

MG: Indeed.

TOM POWER: She has some great ideas about how to help drag performers through this time. Take a listen to this.

SOUNDCLIP

TOM POWER: So you're running a campaign to raise money for Canadian drag queens affected by COVID-19. Can you tell me about it?

BROOKE LYNN HYTES: Sure. Well, the idea originally started, I think, last week with Cameo. Do you know what Cameo is?

TOM POWER: Yeah. It's this thing where you can pay celebrities to wish you happy birthday, right?

BROOKE LYNN HYTES: Yeah. It's the best thing ever. So I have a cameo and I make quite a lot of money off of it usually. So I decided why not have people request videos for their favourite drag queen? And then I will make a video for the drag queen and then also give them all the money from the video just to help out a little bit, because drag queens are, I think, the most independent artists I know. So if they don't work, then like literally they're not making any money. So like, this is a great way that I could help out a little bit. And then Absolut Vodka Canada saw what I was doing and they really wanted to jump on board. So they said they would donate $25,000 to Canadian drag queens. So we decided to pick 50 full time queens across the country and give them each $500.

TOM POWER: For people who haven't heard of Cameo, how does it work?

BROOKE LYNN HYTES: Cameo is basically like you write in a message and say, it's my birthday or it's my friend's birthday or my sister's graduation, that can really be anything you want. I've had friends who've had people write it and say, I want you to break up with my boyfriend for me. So it's not so painful. Yeah. So you could literally request anything you want the person to say and then you can charge whatever you feel is necessary. Yeah. And then you make a video and you send it to them. It literally takes about 60 seconds to do. Very easy money.

TOM POWER: What kind of Cameos during this pandemic have you recorded so far?

BROOKE LYNN HYTES: Lots of like uplifting, you're gonna be OK cameos or Cameos just to like less than encouraging word cameos, I guess you could say.

TOM POWER: Like, stay inside, you know, keep your head up, that kind of thing?

BROOKE LYNN HYTES: Yeah, stay inside, keep your head up. I just recorded one for the McGill University Law School. I guess they needed some encouraging words for these times.

TOM POWER: You say that a drag queens are some of the most independent artists there are. How has the closure of drag bars and performance venues like that affected drag queens in Canada?

BROOKE LYNN HYTES: Well it's effect drag queens and non just in Canada, it's affected drag queens everywhere. I mean, if the bars are closed, literally, we have nowhere to work. We have nothing to do. So especially for Queens, where they make their full time living doing drag, that's hard enough. And then you take away literally every place that they're allowed to work. Like it's really, really scary. And we live tip to tip. We're like it's like a bartender. It's like a server. We live tip to tip. So I just wanted to help create some way where we can get them a little bit of money and give them a little bit of a safety net if possible.

TOM POWER: Like, obviously, you're established now, but if you were starting out, what would this kind of closure have meant to you?

BROOKE LYNN HYTES: It would have meant I don't know what, it would have meant debt, I guess, and being really, really, really poor. It would have been devastating to me if I was starting out as a drag queen, and that's why I think it's so important to give back to the people.

TOM POWER: How can Canadian drag performers apply for this funding?

BROOKE LYNN HYTES: Well, actually, we've already beenm they've already been selected all the winners. It's been happening this week. So we've just been kind of been going through Instagram and going through all the queens we know of in Canada and looking at all of the people who were tagged in my post, which I made on Instagram. And just seeing who's like the most well-known drag queen to like really work the most. And really consider this their full time profession. That was kind of like gold with this, I wanted to make sure beats the queen who kind of needed it the most. So I think we did a pretty good job of that. It was very stressful, though, deciding who to give it to without to give it to you. But I think we did a good job. So I hope it helps.

TOM POWER: I think it's very meaningful. What's your advice to any drag performers who are inside right now and kicking out for the next little while?

BROOKE LYNN HYTES: I mean, I would use this time to really hone your skills if you don't know how to sew. I think now would be a great time to learn. This is a great time to play with your makeup and figure out a look that works really well for you. Figure out how to style wigs better. Make some new mixes, come up with some new performance ideas. I think there's lots to do here to be productive.

TOM POWER: Well, thank you so much for talking to us about this and you stay safe.

BROOKE LYNN HYTES: Thank you so much. You take care.

MG: That's Tom Power in conversation with Brooke Lynn Hytes. RuPaul's Drag Race, a big hit in our home, Tom.

TOM POWER: Oh, it's it's a gigantic hit everywhere. And if I want to point out that if you haven't watched Canada's a Drag on CBC Jamm profiling drag performers across this country. Again, many who are out of work right now. Go check that out. It's perfect stay at home viewing.

MG: Excellent. Tom, thank you. We'll check back in with you a bit later on.

TOM POWER: I'll bring the cat. I look forward to it. Tom Power joining us a bit later on on this extended edition of The Current. The CBC News is next. And then it's that time of the month where the rent is due. Some tenants are getting a break from landlords in these uncertain times, others are just refusing to pay. We'll hear from tenants. We'll hear landlords. I'm Matt Galloway. That's next on The Current. Coming up in about six minutes time. Stay with us.

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Tenants and landlords say more action from governments needed as rent comes due

Guests: Bryan Doherty, Cam Welch, Tony Irwin

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

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MG: Still to come, Andrea Beechey can't go to work or outside, so instead she is entertaining on Instagram from her Toronto apartment. Her kitchen, to be specific. We'll hear from her coming up. But first, it's the end of the month and many say they are not going to pay the bills.

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MG: In Montreal, people are draping white sheets off their balconies. Across Ontario, signs are plastered on utility poles. In Edmonton, a message scrawled in spray paint makes it plain: rent strike. The rent is due tomorrow for the first time since the WHO declared a pandemic and in the face of financial uncertainty, tenants across this country are weighing their options. And some have settled on a plan, keep the rent money in their pockets. Of course, it's not just renters that have bills coming due. Landlords are also facing financial uncertainty. Bryan Doherty is a carpenter who lives in Toronto. Bryan. Good morning.

BRYAN DOHERTY: Hi, Matt. Thanks for having me.

MG: Thanks for joining us. I'm going to ask you a personal question off the top, which is how much do you pay in rent a month?

BRYAN DOHERTY: Two thousand for a two bedroom with my partner.

MG: $2000 a month. And so tomorrow is the 1st of April. The rent is due. What are you going to do?

BRYAN DOHERTY: I have no choice. I can't pay that. Not only do I not have the money, but what little money I have, there's no assurances that any more of it's coming in April. And also, frankly, some even what little money I may have left over, after may be food and potential medicine, I need to think about the people on my floor and in my neighbourhood as well, because they may be faced with hardship and no option in the near future.

MG: And so you're not going to pay the rent?

BRYAN DOHERTY: I amnot. No.

MG: Have you spoken to your landlord about this?

BRYAN DOHERTY: My landlord has been in communication with me through a letter saying that rent is due and that if I face particular financial hardship because of COVID-19, I should avail myself of the potential assistance money that the federal government has yet to put available to us.

MG: So what does that letter say to you?

BRYAN DOHERTY: Essentially a reminder that the first of the month is coming, that rent is due, that things are scary, that there might be money available and that we should try to get as much money as possible together so that we can cover April rent.

MG: And so it sounds as though you are on very different sides of this equation. The landlord has sent a letter saying the rent is due. You say you're not going to pay the rent. Have you followed up in any conversations or anything with the landlord?

BRYAN DOHERTY: The conversations that I'm prioritizing are the conversations that I have with my neighbours and other tenants in the city, because we're essentially on our own. The only communications that we've received are vague at best and non-committal entirely, whether it's from the city, our landlords, the province. We've known that this was coming for a while. Everyone knows. We also know that we've been living in a housing crisis for years, especially as tenants. And this is the tipping point for tens of thousands of families across the province. And it seems as though everyone other than us was just willing to run out the clock and see how things worked out and as tenants, we couldn't afford that. So we started organising together, assisting each other, bringing people into contact with each other as safely as possible so that they know that there's support, that we understand the difficulties that we face and that the responsible decision, faced with severe economic uncertainty and potential threats to our health is to keep our money where it is, what little we have, and try and ride this out together.

MG: I mean, would you say that you're left on your own. The federal government has announced. I mean, this multi-billion dollar plan to help people who find themselves out of work. There's the Canada Emergency Response Benefit for workers whose lost income. There are wage subsidies for small businesses. Are any of those things going to help you?

BRYAN DOHERTY: Potentially. It's yet to be seen because I don't have access to them yet. Like rent is due at midnight tonight. 750,000 households in the city of Toronto pay rent. A large amount of us are paying over 50 percent of our take home wages towards rent. Stats show like these aren't just anecdotes, stats show that two bad weeks for a huge portion of people in Toronto means economic devastation.

MG: Well, and that's and that's something that I think people across the country can relate to, that rent is expensive no matter where you happen to be. What's going to happen at midnight tonight, at 12:01 a.m. when you don't pay and your landlord expects you to pay? What do you think is going to happen?

BRYAN DOHERTY: I think what I'm what I've been doing and what other people need to do is to prepare for any potential outcome, whether it's N4s being issued, whether it's intimidation or threat.

MG: An N4 is an eviction notice.

BRYAN DOHERTY: An N4 is an application for payment and under threat of eviction, whether or not the tribunal is open, whether or not its processing is also kind of unclear to us. And also, frankly, even if people are unable to pay their rent now, there's no reason to think that we would be able to pay it down after the curve is flattened and things potentially go back to normal.

MG: What about for landlords? I mean, the landlord has expenses to pay. The landlord has to pay a mortgage, perhaps, or hydro bills, utility bills. They're on the hook as well. Why shouldn't a landlord get some money to help pay their expenses?

BRYAN DOHERTY: Tenants didn't create the situation. We're trying to deal with it. Landlords are also in, some landlords are also in a very tight situation. But for the response of landlords, I would suggest, would be to take their financial concerns and the difficulties up with their financial institutions and their lenders. The idea that they would come after tennants under these circumstances is unacceptable and likely they won't get much out of it. No one's lying about this situation. No one's trying to game the system here. No one's cheating. It's not there and what little is there is desperately needed. And by that, I mean rent money.

MG: But could you imagine the situation that they find themselves in as well? The squeeze that those tenants find themselves or that the landlords find themselves in?

BRYAN DOHERTY: Yep. And I sympathize with the decent landlord that is concerned for themselves and their tenant. The pressure to alleviate those concerns should be applied to their financial institutions and to their lenders, not to their tenants.

MG: In the meantime, you're not paying tonight.

BRYAN DOHERTY: I can't. And neither can many of my neighbours. Neither can thousands of people across the city. This isn't like an abstract thing. This is a real life situation. It's a social phenomenon. And the idea that there is a social crisis at play. And the idea that the solution to that is all is like a case by case situation is not how you deal with the social situation or a crisis, you deal with it with social solutions.

MG: Bryan, good to speak with you and good luck.

BRYAN DOHERTY: Thank you.

MG: Bryan Doherty is a renter in Toronto whose rent is due midnight tonight and he's not going to be paying. His experience is just one story, but one that, as you heard, resonates across this country. Right now, advocacy groups in different provinces are pulling together to get the government's attention. Cam Welch is a member of the Victoria Tenant Action Group in B.C. Cam, good morning to you.

CAM WELCH: Hi, Matt. How are you?

MG: I'm well, how common is a story like Bryan's?

CAM WELCH: It's incredibly common. Not only now, but before. We did a study, a survey of renters in Victoria and in the Greater Victoria area who expect that the increase in cost of rent on the island will force them to leave the city despite them wanting to stay. So there is a pre-existing housing crisis, the pre-existing rental crisis, that this pandemic is now being applied on top of. And that's what creates such an untenable situation.

MG: What are people forced to consider when it comes to figuring out what they're going to pay if they want to pay the rent or they need to pay the rent? What else might they have to give up?

CAM WELCH: They might have to give up money that they want to spend on food, on medication in some cases. You know, people who have recurring medical bills of various kinds. But it's not just about what you can spend your money on. It's also about the incentive being created for people to go out and make money when it's often unsafe to do so, not only for them, but, of course, for their community. And so that's one of the key problems with the minor top up that B.C. has offered And with a lot of these spot fixes.

MG: You can imagine that landlords are trying to figure out how this is going to work as well. Tony Irwin is president and CEO of the Federation of Rental Housing Providers of Ontario, represents thousands of landlords who rent out hundreds of thousands of residential properties. He's joining us from Oakville, Ontario. Tony, good morning to you.

TONY IRWIN: Good morning, Matt.

MG: When you hear of the situation that renters find themselves in, they're in a pinch. They work. Rent is incredibly expensive across this country and suddenly their work has dried up and they can't afford to pay the rent. What goes through your mind?

TONY IRWIN: Tremendous heartache and sympathy for the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who have been affected by COVID-19, both residents and landlords. I mean, as you know, these are unprecedented times. And everyone, there's no playbook for this. This is something none of us are accustomed to. So it's the stories are difficult to hear. The important thing is that we all work together, to try to get through this.

MG: And so when you say work together, what is the place of tenants in this? There is a campaign that is growing across the country encouraging a widespread rent strike for people not to pay because they can't afford to pay it at midnight tonight.

TONY IRWIN: Right. Of course, I'm listening to the program and I've heard stories, from other. We put out a statement on on Friday and what we're encouraging language and tenants to do is get messages for both. So for landlords, it's to communicate with your tenants as frequently as you can provide all the relevant information that you have around things you're doing in your building to keep your residents safe, government assistance programs that are available, that admittedly the money's not flow yet, but we'll be hopefully flowing soon. And then for residents who are having financial difficulties because they've lost their job or they've had their hours cut back or whatever the case may be, to go to their landlord and explain their situation if they can pay, pay what they can. And then to talk about accessing government assistance and coming up with a plan with their landlord to to deal with the rest.

MG: You heard Bryan's experience. He owes $2000 as of midnight tonight, can't afford to pay, doesn't know when more money is going to be coming in and says he's not going to pay. As somebody who represents landlords, is that the right approach?

TONY IRWIN: I don't think it is. And, you know, we've had meetings with them, whether it be Toronto Mayor John Tory or Ontario Premier Doug Ford, of course, I'm based in Ontario, they have said that they they have not been supportive of that kind of activity. We have bills to pay and we have employees to pay. We have expenses, as you talked about. And so we recognize there are many people who are financially distressed and no one wants anyone to be in that position as an industry. We're here to work with our residents, help them come up with a plan. But in order to do that, we do need to rent to be paid by those who can't pay it, so we can help those who cannot.

MG: What sort of tools do landlords have right now to try to enforce the payment of rent?

TONY IRWIN: So at this point, I think as was previously alluded to, the landlord tenant board is essentially shut down. And of course, there's a ban on evictions in Ontario. Other jurisdictions have done the same. So, you know, at this point, really the conversation there really isn't necessarily any recourse. And of course, we wouldn't be suggesting people should lose their housing in a time like this. So, you know, really, it's about everyone working together, all acting in good faith for the common good. We understand there it's very challenging times, but as it's challenging for residents, it's also challenging for landlords. And I think the best thing we can do is to really all do what we can. Understanding the difficulties we're facing to try to get through this and get out the other side, it's not going to be easy. And no one, I think, is suggesting that it will be, but we all need to work together.

MG: But you heard what I mean, Bryan's landlord said, which and I don't know the whole situation there, but what he described was 'pay the rent. The rent is due. Pay the rent. And if you can't, then you need to go and access government funds.' That seems like a pretty clear line. Do you think that once the courts open back up, there could be a wave of eviction cases to work through because people, because they can't afford to pay it, aren't paying the rent as of tomorrow?

TONY IRWIN: Well, I think right now, given that April 1st, as you said, is tomorrow and this is the first month since this has sort of happened. We are in extremely stressful times. My hope is that over the course of the next month, as government assistance becomes available to people. And of course, we're also talking with government, the Ontario government here about providing direct, direct support for rent. Every political party at Queen's Park is is advocating for that. And now the government should be open to providing additional assistance, as I think it was said in British Columbia. They've provided assistance for, you know, for rent specifically. So we need to continue to have these discussions and provide and get the financial relief that's needed. If that happens, then my hope is that the scenario you've described will not happen because assistance will flow both to individuals and hopefully the landlords to have rent be paid or at least as much as possible to avoid any of those kinds of sort of situations we don't want to see happen down the road.

MG: Cam Welch, what are you calling for tomorrow? Are you encouraging people to withhold the rent as of midnight tonight?

CAM WELCH: We're calling specifically for the B.C. government to to grant a rent suspension. The B.C. government's own attempt at effects is both too small and is not going to come in for the first. So what we're asking is that rent be suspended for the month of April and the mortgages be suspended for the month of April as well, so that homeowners and landlords are also forced to bear the cost.

MG: Would that rent then be due at a later point or would it be forgiven? Would the rent for April, just be wiped off the books? Are you going to owe somebody owes, Bryan was talking about how he pays $2000 a month. Would you suddenly or $4000 later on once things recover?

CAM WELCH: So it needs to just be wiped off the books. The banks and the government can take a hit for a month, a hit that renters and often their landlords aren't able to absorb because to create a debt and an eviction crisis in the summer isn't a tenable solution either.

MG: Tony, what would that mean for landlords if the rent was to be entirely forgiven?

TONY IRWIN: Well I think certaninly you know it's something that for some period of time, you know, I think we're all as I think you Prime Minister Trudeau said, we all have to take a play our role. And that means we're all going to feel pain in this process. And so, you know, is that going to be true of landlord as well? I'm sure. Is that tenable for a long period of time? No, it isn't. So that's why we're continuing to work with government to say and I agree also with that with banks and lenders to say, how can we sort of work through this? But I do take the point that we don't want to put people in a situation where they can't get out from underneath it. You know in a few months time or down the road., we have to admit.

MG: There's this announcement that came last week that the big six banks in this country will allow a six month payment deferral on mortgages due to COVID-19. Now, there have been some questions as to how cleanly that is being executed and whether people can actually access those deferment. But what would that mean for landlords?

TONY IRWIN: Well, so that original announcement applied to residential mortgages. We've been working to find out how that would apply to people in our industry. Of course, some small landlords perhaps that would apply to them. But we represent the language of all sizes who have, many more units than that. And so trying to understand and CMH these but some guidance. So I think it is not another e-mail out. But to clarify this morning what they're doing. So we're certainly working with, you know, with CMHC and with lenders to say can those same types of measures apply to us? Understanding, though, that if it's a deferral, it still has to get paid some day. It may not be paid now, may be paid later. So that will help in the short term, perhaps in terms of cash flows. But it's still gonna have to get paid at some point. So unlike not wanting to bury tenants and cutting costs they can't ever get, now get out from under the same thing applies to landlords.

MG: Just finally, this is not a short term story. I mean, we're talking about weeks and weeks, possibly months, in which the economy is going to be on hold to try to stop the spread of this virus. What's the long term impact if people aren't paying the rent?

TONY IRWIN: Well, I mean, as has been alluded to previously, we do have a shortage of housing across this country. And so, you know, for for many small and large, you know, who we talk about their economic challenges, they've saved downpayment to be able to buy property as a part of their retirement plan and provide provide housing, which we desperately need. If this goes on for a prolonged period of time and I can't put a number on how long it would be, but I mean, certainly there are all kinds of impacts that could be felt, sort of ripple effects throughout, you know, throughout the housing market, which I think we wouldn't want to see. We don't want to see housing disappear at a time we need it more than ever.

MG: If you're a landlord, how long can you go without getting a rent check?

TONY IRWIN: Well I think that varies based on, you know, based on the landlord and the circumstance. You know, it's some people could perhaps last a few months. You know, I think many small landlords, you know, may not even be able to last that long. They might go a month. You know, I think it really depends on the circumstance. But and also, is it all rent not being paid? Is some being paid? Depending on the deferrals being offered. Obviously there are a variety of factors But I think what's safe to say is we can't go on for a very long time without more assistance coming through. Not only what's been announced already, but probably additional assistance as well.

MG: Tony Irwin, good to speak with you. Thank you.

TONY IRWIN: Thanks, Matt.

MG: Tony Irwin, President CEO of the Federation of Rental Housing Providers of Ontario. We reached him in Oakville. Before that speaking of Cam Welch, member of the Victoria Tenants Action Group.

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MG: This is The Current on CBC Radio One. My name is Matt Galloway. You'd think that in the three months since it appeared in China, there might be some agreement on what to call this virus. For weeks, the U.S. president continued to call it the China virus. Last Thursday, a joint agreement among G7 foreign ministers was scuttled when the U.S. State Department insisted in calling it the Wuhan virus. Beth Skwarecki is the author of Outbreak: 50 Tales of Epidemics That Terrorized the World. She says it matters that we get this naming right. Just a warning. She uses a bit of strong language to make that point.

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VOICE: All the legit health and policy organizations out there, including the W.H.O. and the Public Health Agency of Canada, are calling the coronavirus disease by its agreed upon name COVID-19. But a few folks are stubbornly arguing that we should call it the Chinese virus or otherwise peg its name to a location. That's bullshit. And here's why. Many diseases in the past have been named after the place they originated, and that turned out to be a bad idea for many reasons. For one, it's often not accurate. The pandemic influenza of 1918 was nicknamed the Spanish Flu. In many countries, not because it started in Spain, but because governments didn't want word to get out that they were experiencing a disease outbreak while they were at war. Spain's newspapers were uncensored, so they were the first to report on it at length. The virus actually originated elsewhere, possibly in Kansas. So a more accurate geographical name might have been the American flu or Kansas flu. But nobody wants their home country to be infamous for originating a disease, accurate or not. How would you feel if you lived near the Ebola river or the Zika forest. Associating a disease with a place can also interfere with properly dealing with an outbreak? When there is a plague outbreak in Chinatown in San Francisco in 1900, anti-Chinese racism and xenophobia contributed to discrimination, stigmatization and bungled health policy for all of these reasons. The World Health organisation issued guidelines a few years ago about naming diseases in a way that describes them accurately without stigmatizing people or places or inciting unnecessary fear. Diseases are now supposed to be named after their symptoms, characteristics and the cause of the disease if no. COVID 19 short for coronavirus disease discovered in 2019 is an appropriate name. Here's what they don't recommend. Anything to do with geographic locations. People's names. Sorry Lou Gehrig. Or species of animal or food like swine flu, bird flu or monkeypox. And don't even think about cultural population, industry or occupational references. Things like legionnaires disease. Remember there was actually a time when people were calling HIV gay cancer. So yes, there were diseases named that way in the past, but the public health community learned from their mistakes and we don't do that anymore. Anybody who is arguing today in 2020 for a geographical name for a disease is either naive of this history or is trying to deliberately stir up xenophobic sentiments. World leaders are now blaming each other for the virus, which is silly. It's just a virus. So let's take it seriously and call it by its real name.

MG: Beth Skwarecki is the senior health editor at Lifehacker and the author of Outbreak: 50 Tales of Epidemics The Terrorized the World. Still to come on this extended edition of The Current, a conversation with Adam Gopnik, he's a writer for The New Yorker, has strong ties to Canada. He wrote a great piece in the magazine last week on what it's like to live in New York, a city that is usually teeming with people and has been emptied, at least on the streets as people stay home. He'll tell us why he considered writing that pandemic out here in Canada, then decided against it. That's coming up in about 90 seconds. I'm Matt Galloway. And this is The Current on CBC Radio One.

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Writer Adam Gopnik on bearing witness to New York City’s COVID-19 crisis

Guests: Adam Gopnik

MG: Hi. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. You've probably heard that New York City is struggling with COVID-19. To help you understand the urgency of it. Have a listen to this. This is the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo.

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VOICE: I am asking health care professionals across the country, if you don't have a health care crisis in your community, Please come help us in New York now. We need relief. We need relief for nurses who are working 12 hour shifts. We need relief for doctors. We need relief for attendance. So if you're not busy, come help us, please.

MG: Sometimes hearing a voice can bring things to life and convey the gravity of the situation. Our next voice is also from New York City. Adam Gopnik is a staff writer for The New Yorker. The author of several books. He's a Canadian. He's in New York City this morning. Adam, good morning.

ADAM GOPNIK: Hey, good morning, Matt.

MG: What's it like for you to hear that kind of desperate plea for help from your city, from your governor?

ADAM GOPNIK: Well, you know, not a lot to be said for being stuck. You know, at the epicentre of a pandemic, and it's obviously it's disquieting, unsettling to hear those that kind of sound. I will say on behalf of Governor Cuomo that that was an unusually fervent cry for help for him. He's been actually one of the voices of calm, if blunt, empirical reason throughout this whole crisis, levelling with New Yorkers about what what's actually going on and giving the kind of hope that comes from being levelled with. But, you know, obviously, Matt, it's a uniquely scary and worrying time to be a New Yorker.

MG: What is your city like today?

ADAM GOPNIK: Well, I just came out from walking the dog. That's the only outing I've been taking the last couple of weeks. It's somewhat unreal scores at once, Matt. On the one hand, the streets on the whole are emptied. And of course, there's, you know, one tenth of the of the taxi traffic and the usual a war of life on New York streets. On the other hand, there is quite a bit of life still going on in the park. I live about a block from Central Park, so I could see people running on the reservoir as they've been doing for as long as I can imagine. And sort of the most favoured jogging track of New Yorkers. And it's almost a little disturbing at times because there seems to be a sort of a blocking and difference. I know it's something that troubles Governor Cuomo a great deal in the in the intersections. I'm not sure that everyone is doing an adequate job of public spacing. It's a weird time to be around last night in a burst of what was meant as goodwill, certainly the Empire State Building, a famous tall building, which you may have heard of.

MG: Indeed.

ADAM GOPNIK: On its peak, you know, it has a kind of now kind of mobile or maybe which they lay while lighting display and it put a kind of simulacra of of an ambulance siren on the very top. So it seemed to be spinning round the way that an ambulance light does, which was meant as a tribute to the to the medical workers, obviously, but had a slightly eerie effect like that of a Batman movie to be saying that thing, this giant ambulance siren turning round and round as you went out onto the street. So it's a uniquely disquieting time, worrying time at all the same. You know, the reality is this is an enormous city of 9 million people. And part of the how to put this well met. Part of the cat standing, the whole tragedy and crisis is, is that the key thing is not to overload the hospitals and one talks, but that all the time. And that's as true in in Toronto, I know as it is in New York. But as a consequence, you know, the the absolute numbers of people being admitted to the hospital, as Governor Cuomo points out every day in this briefing, can be relatively small. I think it's about six or seven thousand people now in the context of a city of nine million and still be sufficient to completely breakdown our capacity to care for them. The medical system's capacity to care for him. So that's the kind of complexity that we're dealing with. And then also the reality that the people on the front lines, properly compared to soldiers are the nurses and the doctors who are dealing with people in emergency wards. And we don't see them. We we can't see them a little bit like the R.A.F. in in World War Two there, you know, far away. And we hear every day reports of what they're accomplishing or what they're struggling with, but they are not part of our immediate apprehension. And that only increases the the eerie and disquieting quality of life.

MG: How do you make sense of what's happened to your city? I mean, it's people know New York. It's a city we were seeing earlier teems with people there. You wrote that the point of a city in some ways is social proximity, that you're always around somebody and it's been emptied in many quarters. But also there's this makeshift hospital that's being set up in Central Park. There's a a Navy hospital ship that is docked in Manhattan to provide relief to those frontline workers. How do you make sense of what's happened to your city?

ADAM GOPNIK: I don't think you can make sense of it. I think it's one of those things that you can experience and witness, but the sense you're going to make of it will come much later if at all. You know, the the makeshift hospital in Central Park, by the way, Matt, is a real oddity. It's very strange and hard to understand exactly what its origins are because it's been put up by a very fundamentalist evangelical group who want to change doctors and not gay, who don't respect gay marriage. It's a bizarre thing in New York, and it's very unclear to me who gave it permission and why it's there doesn't seem like a terribly effective use of that space. And then putting that to one side. I think, you know, the the reality is and I take no comfort in this, but try and take some insight from it is remember, this is now global. Right. You know, Paris city where I lived for many years is equally shut down right now. If anything, even more so what's happening in New York is part of the, you know, this crisis of the cosmopolitan. And part of the obvious paradox of things is that the more cosmopolitan the city is and cities are meant to be cosmopolitan. We admire cities, the more cosmopolitan they become in Toronto in in recent decades. But that means that there is a constant influx of travellers. It means that they have enormous density. Those were always positive virtues, things to admire about New York. There are the things that drew a young Canadian magnetically to to come here, as I did many years ago. And now they're in this kind of fiendishly vengeful, as I say, almost a horror movie like way or comic book like way turn now against the city. And that in itself is hugely painful. And it also means, of course, that, you know, I lived through 9/11 in New York and wrote about it. And that was in some ways profoundly disquieting and disorienting experience. And people tend to forget now that though, in retrospect, we all know that the worst was over when the worst was over and there was actually no second act. It didn't feel that way at the time. People now forget there were the anthrax letters and so on went on and there was general enormous apprehension about the next attack and the follow up attacks. That was hardly a time just of of mourning. It was also a time of fear. But that was a simple way to deal with that fear. There was at least a temporary antidote to that fear, and that was to clump together. That was to reassert, underline, italicize intermingling. You had dinner with friends. You came together with friends. And exactly that. The most basic and essential of human responses to anxiety and fear being with others is exactly what your rightly and understandably forbidden right now, aside from the tiny group of people your family you may be sequestered with. And that in itself, I think, is a profoundly not only non urban way of functioning, but in many ways an inhuman way of having to function.

MG: You wrote that crises take an X-ray of the city's class structure. What has been revealed about New York's have and have nots in this crisis?

ADAM GOPNIK: That's a good question. And yes, I did write about it. Well, you see all kinds of fault lines. The obvious ones of the very rich and the not very rich, the very rich have largely vacated the city, I think, in ways that are somewhat scandalous, given that the the very richest of New Yorkers, the people who made their money from exactly the qualities of New York that we've been describing, the entanglement of many, the the density and the possibilities of New York, and they've mostly skedaddled to their country houses in a tradition as I wrote in that piece that goes back to Boccaccio and the plague in Florence in the 14th century, when everybody went outside to help that could afford it. But I do think that we are seeing a deficit of civic virtue on the part of the very wealthy, which is concerning, to put it mildly. At the same time, we've also seen a kind of white collar, blue collar split below that, the level of the very rich white collar people, including myself. People who write or think or analyse for a living can do it from their studies. People who are working in grocery stores or working at an Amazon warehouse can't. They have to continue to actually go physically to work. And I don't think anybody fully understood how much courage and dedication it would take to be a grocery store clerk. And yet those people are are demonstrating that kind of courage out of compulsion, perhaps as much as anything, but they are. And one sees it too, as I wrote in that piece, in the simple courage of the bicycle delivery people, you know, most of them recent immigrants, Mexicans, Nepalese, all kinds who are continuing to supply the city in home delivery so that blue collar, white collar split is as is as visible as in some ways the split of the very rich and the and the not very rich is. So all of those fault lines, I think are becoming are becoming increasingly evident. I will add that, of course, one of the things that makes a plague of any kind so, so brutal is that the plague is no respecter a person's. It doesn't choose who who to assault and whom not to. And of course, there are people from every imaginable social class and walk of life who are being afflicted.

MG: Did you think about leaving? I mean you have family here in Canada and in those moments, people think about, you know, their civic duty, but they also think about themselves. Did you think about that?

ADAM GOPNIK: Of course, I'm not superhuman or, you know, a particular repository of courage and virtue. My folks who I hope are listening to us.,I haven't seen them in quite a while now are up in their beautiful place outside Camp Wolfert, Ontario. And they of course, we thought, well, maybe this is the time to go back up home. My wife's family they're all in Edmonton, but it became impossible or very difficult fairly quickly. And then I guess and I say this with absolutely no bravado, mad at all. But, you know, part of what we do is we choose where we make our homes and then we are responsible to our home in in lots of ways. You know, I was here over 9/11 and tried to bear witness as best I could to that moment in that experience. And, you know, that's what writers do. You know, writers have lots of different responsibilities. Part of our responsibility as artists is to be as honest as we can about what our real private experience is like and share it in public, you know, which includes feelings of apprehension, fear, cowardice, uncertainty. And part of our responsibility is to be citizens and to, you know, to be the ones who can try and organise and articulate common emotions. And this is obviously a time when your job as a citizen is even more important than your job as an artist. The greatest writers of all, I suppose if I reflect on it, someone like Albert can't move or Charles Dickens, for that matter, managed to combine the role of witness and artist in ways that are still inspiring and I suppose we have to however, more lowly situated we are look at most still as beacons.

MG: There's a developing narrative and again, nobody knows when this is going to end, but people are starting to talk about how we will be different when we come out of this. How do you think your city will be different?

ADAM GOPNIK: I don't know Matt. You know, I'm a bit of a sceptic almost to the point of being a cynic about transformational change of that kind. As I've said several times, I lived through 9/11 and the experience of 9/11, and though that was wildly different in lots of ways. Still, many people said at the time that nothing will go back to the way it was. Irony will be over, if you may remember that, or we will have a new common purpose in fighting whatever we were fighting Islamo-fascism or something. And there was a calls for a new regimentation of society and a new sense of purpose in the rest of it. And the truth is, once the fears receded. Life went on very much as it had before, with the exception of certain heroic actions and certain shameful actions that the crisis had engendered. You know, I mentioned a moment ago, and of course, everybody has been thinking about this great novel, The Plague in this time. And that was rather his point was not that the play had transformed the city. The imaginary city he was describing. But that is it brought to the fore all of the things that were already latent in it. And once the plague was over, people on the whole went back to life as it was before, with a new understanding. If they were alert at all to the true nature of the city, they were. They came from the character that they each possessed. I suspect that it's going to be much more a question of that kind of inner understanding, that kind of personal insight than some vast social transformation that takes place. I say that that as I monitor myself, speaking with the belief that things will go back to normal.

MG: All of us hope that.

ADAM GOPNIK: Right? And of course, there's you know that let's be blunt. You know, we don't know how this turns out. We don't know how it goes. And one can easily construct a more nightmarish scenarios, which is not to do them. And I think we're right not to do it. But I think that the transformations that tend to happen through crises tend to be more individual and internal than actually civic and public.

MG: OK, so let's end on the individual. There's this idea that people are stuck at home. And we've been hearing from health care professionals, nurses, doctors, people on the frontlines saying you're not stuck at home, you're safe at home and do the right thing and stay home. But that means that there are things that we can't do, whether it's going to a friend's house for dinner, whether it's being able to hug the friend that you run into on the street, go to a restaurant, work, what won't you take for granted when this is over?

ADAM GOPNIK: Well, you know, as a writer, I'm in the. The slightly apologetic situation that my life changes less than most people. You know, for the last 20 years, all I do is get up, have coffee, write for five hours, go to the gym, go shopping for food, cook dinner, and then read and listen to music and then it all starts again. And it's exactly the life I'm leading now, safe at home with the exception of going to the gym. We put up a little home gym in the middle of our of our apartment. And so I would be lying to you if I said my life has changed. The one good thing about being a writer and painter or an artist of that kind is that self-isolation is the foundation in which you construct your existence. But I miss my friends. You know, I miss that the. I miss not the the deep exchanges, which you still have on phone and Zooms and whatnot. And of course, I've got my family tied around me here. But one of the things that makes city life so joyful, why we're addicted to it is because of the countless bumping into us that we get. You know, I wrote a story once called Bumping into Mr. Ravioli about my daughter's imaginary friend shortly after 9/11, who was always too busy to play with her. And it was her three year old picture of a city made up of countless bumping into people, hopping into taxis, people running into each other. That's an idiom we use all the time. Oh, I ran into Matt the other day and we don't think twice about it. It just is the way our lives is structured. We're not running into anybody right now. We're not bumping into anybody. And I think that that the power of those kinds of small ties, unexpected ties, is the thing I miss most.

MG: Take care of yourself and it's a great pleasure, as always, to talk to you, Adam. Thank you.

ADAM GOPNIK: Pleasure to talk to you, Matt. Love to all there.

MG: Adam Gopnik is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He's also written several books, including A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventures of Liberalism. He was in New York City.

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Toronto resident creates Instagram show to help deal with self-isolation

Guests: Andrea Beechey

MG: This is The Current on CBC Radio One, extended edition of the program. My name's Matt Galloway and like many of you, Andrea Beechey is at home. She's been stuck in her Toronto apartment feeling a little lonely. So she decided to reach out by filming a show in her kitchen. It's called Doing It with Andrea.

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[Clip of "Doing It With Andrea"]

MG: Along with a cocktail shaker, Andrea's theme song, "Doing It With Andrea" is picking up a bit of a following on Instagram. Andrea Beechey is on the line with us. Andrea, good morning.

ANDREA BEECHEY: Hi, Matt. Thanks for having me.

MG: You have your own theme song.

ANDREA BEECHEY: I know, I know. I woke up one morning and after the first episode, I started singing that L.L. Cool J song and, you know, I thought, let's just call it Doing It With Andrea.

MG: You're doing it in the kitchen. And this is a show, I mean, part of it's about cooking. Why don't you describe what the show actually is?

ANDREA BEECHEY: Well, the show is basically ten minutes of, I think, just pure fun. You may learn how to make a cocktail or even clean a toilet. I've described it as the adult romper room where I try to give a shout out to friends and businesses in my community that really, you know, need that extra plug and support right now. You know, they're all struggling. So I have so many friends that own small businesses, and I just wanted to show my love and support.

MG: Tell me a bit more about the motivation behind this. We're all trying to figure out what to do in these unusual times. Why an Instagram show?

ANDREA BEECHEY: Well, it was after a week of myself quarantined, and I think like most of us, I was feeling so isolated and lonely and depressed and really worried about the future. And someone actually challenged me. Why do you do something you love today? And I thought, yeah, let's do that. And, you know, I love to entertain. I love having friends over. So I just started I thought, let's film me making my favourite cocktail. And, you know, I had seen my friends online who have small businesses that were struggling. And I thought, I'll give a couple of shout outs.

MG: You've moved and we heard a little bit of that in the clip, you're moving through some various countries that are in the midst of this crisis. Tell us a little bit about why you wanted to do that.

ANDREA BEECHEY: Well, I wanted to really, you know, I was missing that connection with the outside world and, you know, watching the news all the time, and I think it's important we're so grateful that we live in Canada and have no Justin Trudeau as our Prime Minister, but some countries aren't so lucky and I wanted to show in solidarity, you know, our Canadian support of these other countries.

MG: So we heard Iran and Spain and a little bit of Italy there as well. Tell us about the Italian episode.

ANDREA BEECHEY: Well, Italy is like really breaking our hearts right now. And I wanted to, you know, just tribute them. And, you know, the process basically is me going into the fridge, trying to find ingredients that, you know, can relate to that country. And then a scavenger hunt around the house to try to find props and like little details that add to the episode. But, you know, I just think Italy right now really needs, you know, all the love that they can get.

MG: You're in quarantine or you were in quarantine when you were doing this. Do you have extensively stocked pantry so that you can move through these various countries easily?

ANDREA BEECHEY: Yes. Well, I had and then luckily, you know, a lot of friends have been delivering at our doorstep. You know, ingredients and goodies. So I just, you know, done my best with what I had and, you know, I've had a lot of support from my friends and my mom.

MG: Why were you under quarantine?

ANDREA BEECHEY: I was, we had gone to Poland for personal reasons. My partner's mom had died in October and we had to close up her apartment. So it was kind of a necessary trip, but like two days in Poland was going on lockdown and it was, you know, basically the amazing race to play back home.

MG: Had you been in quarantine and not come up with this idea for a show, what do you think you would have been doing?

ANDREA BEECHEY: Well, I mean, I think I would have been really lonely. I think my closet probably would have been a bit more organised, but, you know, I work in fashion. I'm so used to dealing with people and I was really craving and and needed that, you know, connection with my friends and family. You know, I I don't know what I would've been doing, but I think I would have been, you know, probably Netflixing or organizing closet. So this has really given me a purpose and brought me so much joy.

MG: We're learning that people are doing all sorts of things and part of this, maybe they feel like they have to, but also they have the time. And so they might be sewing, they might be learning another language. Maybe they're reading the things that they should have read before they wanted to read, but they never got around to that big pile. Had you ever done anything like this before? Any experience in making a TV show?

ANDREA BEECHEY: No, no. You know, I think it's always been probably deep inside of me. I'm always, you know, try to been I've always been maybe the class clown or the life of a party, but just secretly inside my own head, but no, I've never done the show before.

MG: And ae you just do it by yourself or do you have help in doing this? You mentioned. You know, shout out to your mpm, but are there other people who are helping you out with this?

ANDREA BEECHEY: Well, I am., you know, well on the show I write, create, produce, star in it, but my partner is here and she is doing the camera work and doing some great cinematography, but yeah I do have that support.

MG: Cinematography through the phone.

ANDREA BEECHEY: Yeah, exactly.

MG: This goes out on Instagram and one of the things that's helping people through this period of physical distancing is that people can connect in ways that they wouldn't have otherwise through the technology that we're all surrounded with. What's the response been like?

ANDREA BEECHEY: Oh, God the response has been so lovely. I mean, I've had such an outpouring of love and support from, you know, close friends to friends I haven't seen, you know, in decades old friends that live in London. And, you know, I think I'm most surprised by how people say it really brightens their day. And, you know, that's been the main purpose. And drive for me to continue this is that, you know, maybe I'm touching someone or I was alone at home and just, you know, giving them a moment in the day that they can kind of escape from all the worries right now.

MG: So, I mean, that's where we'll end on that. Is this is a difficult time for people and so what would you say to somebody who who is finding this physical distancing, this isolation that they might be in, a difficult thing to come to terms with.

ANDREA BEECHEY: Well, yesterday, Drake had a post up, and this is really what stuck with me and I think what I believe. He said you have the biggest heart and that is your greatest gift. And I think that is our greatest gift are our hearts. And I think, you know, just reach out, do anything in the day that, you know, makes you feel better about yourself or the situation or someone else. I think the gift of giving is, you know, is the easiest and best thing that we have right now. And I'm just doing my part and just trying to, you know, make this time a little easier for some people.

MG: Maybe a new career as a TV star when this is all done.

ANDREA BEECHEY: Maybe.

MG: Andrea, thank you. Good luck.

ANDREA BEECHEY: Thanks, Matt.

MG: Andrea Beechey, Toronto resident who started her own Instagram show during self-isolation. It's called Doing It With Andrea. There all these stories of people who, in the midst of this really heavy time, have found something that has lifted up their spirits. Maybe they're doing it themselves, maybe they've connected with somebody they don't know. If you have found something in this moment that has given you a bit of a spark, a bit of life, we'd love to hear from you. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC, find us on Facebook or send us an email. You can do that right through the website cbc.ca/thecurrent. This is The Current on CBC Radio One. I'm Matt Galloway. We're back in about six minutes time. Stay with us.

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How the stages of grief can help us cope with COVID-19

Guests: David Kessler

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway, and you're listening to The Current.

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MG: Coming up, are you missing going to the art gallery or the museum? Tom Power coming up and he has some visual arts news along with tips on how you can enjoy art from the comfort of your living room. That's on its way, but first, let's talk about our feelings.

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MG: This is a serious question. How are you doing? These are difficult times. And you know that being out of your routine and separated from your loved ones can be tough. You might be feeling fear, you might feel anger, you may feel frustration. My next guest believes there's something else at the root of these emotions, and that is grief. You may have heard of the five stages of grief. David Kessler co-wrote the book that first described them. David, good morning.

DAVID KESSLER: Good morning. Good to be with you.

MG: Good to have you. How are you doing?

DAVID KESSLER: I'm okay in our strange world. I'm, you know, I have a subject no one wants to talk about, but now everyone's like, wait, wait, tell us more about that.

MG: Why is it that that's subject grief is the right word for what a lot of us are feeling right now?

DAVID KESSLER: Well, because of the world we have known has now been lost. You know, a month ago, the world we lived in is forever gone. And we find that horribly sad. How could we not? And it's just beginning to sink in. I think, you know, people have said, I don't know, why did I cry last night? Why did I get up so sad this morning? What's this heaviness? And the reality is that is what we call grief and it's affecting all of us.

MG: And that can apply even to those of us who have not lost a loved one to COVID-19?

DAVID KESSLER: Absolutely. You know, there were you know, grief is certainly I mean, the worst grief we deal with in this lifetime is the physical death of a loved one. But we also deal with grief when we have to cancel our wedding, when we can't see our friends, when our kids can't go on spring break. You know, all these disappointments, the isolation that we're feeling is a loss. You know, I always say there's no comparing grief. So it's not that, you know, not being able to go to see your friends is equal to a loved one dying. That's certainly not the case, but at the same time, this is a loss we're all feeling.

MG: Walk us through this, because in the book that you wrote with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, you talk about the stages of grief and people may know of those stages and they might wonder how that applies to this situation. So so explain just briefly what the stages are, but also how they would show up in this crisis.

DAVID KESSLER: Sure. So Elisabeth Kubler-Ross first identified these stages of dying in 1969, and I was privileged to adapt them with her in 2000. And the stages are denial. And I'll tell you what they would be like right now. Denial, I can't believe this is happening. What happened to the world we loved didn't do anger. This is really upsetting me. All right. Enough now, like let's get back to our lives. Bargaining. All right. If I do two weeks in, like, you know, social distancing, then we can all get back together. Right. And this I'll be fine. And depression, which is sadness like, my gosh, this is so sad that this is our new world and we can't see anyone. And acceptance and acceptance is where the power is, where we acknowledge us. This is our new reality. How can I make this work? How can I move forward? And one of the things I want to say to everyone, you know, I a few years ago had one of the worst things that can happen is I had a younger son who died and I just did not want to stop at acceptance. I wanted to help us find a new stage. And that's the sixth stage called Meaning. And it's really about post-traumatic growth. And while we're all going through these stages now, I do hope the day will come. When this is over, we find some meaning and post-traumatic growth that we're going to have post-traumatic stress. But I also hope we'll find some growth in this too.

MG: Do those stages always evolve in that order? Do we always go through them in that way?

DAVID KESSLER: Cuh a good question, Matt. I'm glad you asked that. They're not linear. You can feel five of them at the same hour. You know, our our grief is very organic. You know, we all get to feel different things in different ways. So I tell people they're not a match for grief. You know, grief is something very organic that we all know how to do without any stages.

MG: Where do you think as a society and again, there are different societies, obviously, and different people are experiencing this in different ways, but where are we at in that? Are we still in the bargaining phase of things, trying to figure out, you know, how we can get out of this? Have we gotten any closer to acceptance in this?

DAVID KESSLER: I think we're just swirling around in all of them right now. I think people are in different phases. I mean, early on, there was a lot of people in denial, I think. People are coming out of denial that, holy cow, people are could die from this and are dying from this, and we really need to get serious about this. So I think a lot of us are in different places and I think that's what makes for some of the interesting and confusion. And, you know, frustration that we all are in different places, just like we all in grief usually. You know, we all handle it differently.

MG: There's also this idea that you've explored called anticipatory grief. What is that?

DAVID KESSLER: Anticipatory grief is that healthy grief we all have that. You know, when you're growing up, you know, someday your parents are going to die when they get really older. What's happening now is unhealthy grief, that as we're getting scared and we're hearing and watching the news, our mind begins to show us pictures. Oh, my goodness. My grandparents could die. You know, when our mind begins to show us the worst scenario. And I tell people that's your protective, primitive mind giving you those anticipatory, you know, grief, which is really raising your anxiety. And what we can do to help is when we picture those worst scenarios, also picture the best scenarios. Yes, my grandparents could get ill and die. But it's equally true. My grandparents could actually not get it or they might get it. And they have a mild case and survive it just fine. So there's no future we know for sure. But we want to make sure if our mind begins to picture the worst, we balance it out by adding the best.

MG: Is it wrong to feel that anticipatory grief because there are awful things that are happening.

DAVID KESSLER: It's very normal.

MG: And the stories are very real.

DAVID KESSLER: Very normal. Of course it's very normal. The only thing is we want the information, but we don't want to get stuck there. We don't want to get paralyzed there. We don't want to say, oh, well, it's all pointless. We're going to die. We don't want to do that either. You know, I always say fear doesn't stop death, fear stops life. So we don't want to become a victim of our fear.

MG: People have been connecting with each other and we've been talking about this over the course of the last several weeks. But people have been connecting with each other through social media, through technology, in ways that would allow them to be together without actually physically being together. And you've been doing that through Facebook, through these online support groups?

DAVID KESSLER: Absolutely. One of the shocking things that happened is, you know, people who were in grief before this, after a loved one died, suddenly were finding their grief cancelled because we can't get together. And a woman called me, whose husband had died a week ago and was sitting alone in her apartment with no one. And I thought, I have to get a group together. So went on Facebook, got together an online grief group, and a thousand people joined the first day. So we meet every day. And even though we're disconnected, we find community and still connect with each other. People can find that information at grief.com if anyone's had a death of a loved one and needs some support. We're there every day and many evenings.

MG: What are you finding personally the most difficult? You started out by saying you doing, you know, sort of as well as possible, given the peculiar circumstances that we're in. So much of the things that we took for granted have now been suspended and put on the shelf to be retrieved at some point in time in the future. What are you finding the most difficult?

DAVID KESSLER: I miss restaurants. I miss seeing friends. I miss you know, I love working with groups and teaching. And, you know, I'm here alone in a little office. So it's a very different world. You know, I'm someone who likes to be around people. So it's a challenging thing.

MG: And what do you do to cope with, I mean again, that's that sense of loss. And it can, what are you doing with that?

DAVID KESSLER: Of course. I'm just trying to force myself to FaceTime with people more, to Skype with people more and really connect in ways I haven't thought of doing.

MG: You could imagine that there are some people, some people perhaps who have more influence than others who are in still that denial stage, which can be really difficult and that can be really dangerous as well. If you are stuck at that point of things, what can you do to move somebody beyond that?

DAVID KESSLER: So one of the things that's really important is we realise what's in our control and not in our control. And so we have to say to that friend or neighbour who is not cooperating, not sort of going along with physical distancing. We have to say, look, I love you. I'm worried for your health. I want to make sure I stay healthy. You don't seem to be playing by the rules. So I would love for you to play by the rules so we could, you know. See each other at six feet or take a walk at six feet apart. But, you know, I just I can't watch you put your life at risk and put other people's life at risk and I love you and I want you to stay healthy.

MG: You also started by talking about the stigma around this, that, you know, your life's work is speaking about something that people don't want to speak about and that can create, you know, a sense of exacerbated isolation at a time when people feel isolated. If you have somebody in your life that's really struggling, but they don't want to speak about that because of that stigma, how do you try to reach them?

DAVID KESSLER: Well, you know, I always believe in talking about myself first. Rather than thing to the other person, you know, I think you're grieving, you really need to let it out. I'm someone who goes, you know, this morning I was feeling sad and I just I allowed myself to feel sad and afterwards I just felt better. I was really angry and I just allowed myself to feel that anger. You know, it's strange. In our modern world, we are a society that we have feelings about feelings. It's a by-product of the self-help movement that we get angry. But then we think we shouldn't be angry. We get upset and think we shouldn't be upset. And we don't allow ourselves to just feel our emotions. And we have these heartfelt emotions and emotions actually need motion. They need to move through us. So I tell people, stay in your first generation feelings. Your emotions are only going to last a couple of minutes. Let them pass through you.

MG: You spoke about what happened after the death of your child, where you went through those stages and then thought there needs to be something else and talks about that sixth phase in finding meaning. Where do you find meaning in what we're all in right now?

DAVID KESSLER: Well, that that is what I wanted to write. And I interviewed many people for the new book, Finding Meaning about how they had found meaning after 9/11 and after earthquakes and different tragedies and different losses. So the meaning right now that I'm finding is I live in a little neighbourhood that I suddenly am seeing as I walk around kids playing in the front lawn with their parents like I've never seen that. So kids are suddenly finding time with their parents. Maybe we're getting a little more intimate with friends and talking on a deeper level. Maybe we're going to appreciate things a little more after this. You know, it'll be interesting to see all those little ways that we're finding meaningful moments, because I think the meaning is there. It doesn't mean this isn't horrible. It doesn't mean this is good. What we're going through, you know, meaning doesn't take away the pain or the upset or the sadness. But it can be a cushion if you go, you know, I've been given this gift of time and connecting with my loved ones. Let me use this wisely.

MG: When you spoke about the things that you can't control. I mean, there's an element to that. It's about compassion as well. I mean, there are traditions that were spoken about that for years where if you can relinquish some of that control, maybe you can find empathy and compassion in what somebody else is going through. Is that what we need in this?

DAVID KESSLER: Absolutely. You know, I've been saying we're all stocking up on toilet paper. And we also need to stock up on compassion that, you know, everyone we know is fighting a battle we know nothing about. You know, any argument fight with a family member, a discussion, someone, you know, at a certain point it gets resolved and people start saying, oh, you don't know. I was having issues with my husband at that time or you don't know. I mean, everyone has so many fears. I have a someone I work with that just snapped the other day very angrily. And that was so not like her. And I was just clear. You know, she's in fear right now and, you know, we're all struggling with this. So it is a time of extra compassion.

MG: Do you find just finally that people are being perhaps a bit more open and talking about something that they didn't want to talk about, whether they apply the label of grief to it or not, that at the very least, they're willing to talk about what we're all in?

DAVID KESSLER: Absolutely. I am seeing that change that, you know, this is a moment that collectively we are able to talk about it and I'm hoping it will give us a bit more appreciation for those we love and the world we live in. And, you know, we'll see, but that's my hope.

MG: David, it's great to speak with you about this. Thank you.

DAVID KESSLER: Thank you so much. And anyone who's dealing and needs support, please go to grief.com and find that group. Thank you so much for doing it Matt.

MG: David Kessler is the co-author of On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss. His latest book is Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. And as he mentioned, he's the founder of grief.com.

This is The Current on CBC One. I'm Matt Galloway. Tom Power, host of Q, is back with us, Tom, hello.

TOM POWER: Matt, I got dressed up to talk to you right now and if you're wondering what that means. Yes, I put on socks.

MG: Too much information, my friend. I didn't need to know that, but thank you. Talking about loss with David Kessler and that whole idea of loss is a really powerful one because a lot of the things we're saying that people take for granted, but they love are now, you know, discontinued, postponed. The arts is a big thing. I was reading through magazine and it was a couple of weeks old because I was late and I didn't get around to it and it had all these listings for things that I'm not actually going to be able to go and take part in because the arts have been put on the shelf for a minute.

TOM POWER: I mean, that's the thing. I mean, we have so much happening online right now, but, you know, Instagram live concerts and plays and speeches and all that stuff, but in terms of visual arts, I don't know about you, but I'm walking around my neighbourhood looking at all these stores going. I wonder if they're going to be back open. And I heard a report that one third of American museums have closed during the pandemic. Those that have closed may not open again.

MG: What about here in Canada?

TOM POWER: So I talked to Sean O'Neill about this. Sean is the host and executive producer of In the Making on CBC Arts. We talked about how Canadian artist art institutions, how they're being impacted by the pandemic. What you can do to support them, what the situation for visual arts is going to look like in the future in Canada, but most importantly, how you can take in some visual art and maybe make your day a little brighter. Take a listen.

SOUNDCLIP

[Tom Power's interview with Sean O'Neill]

MG: That's the CBC's Tom Power speaking with Sean O'Neill. Sean is the host and executive producer of the CBC Arts Show in the Making. The Current continues in about 90 seconds time. I'm Matt Galloway. This is an extended edition of The Current on CBC Radio One. We're back in about a minute and a half. Stay with us.

10

A conversation with Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard

Guests: Tom Power, Ben Gibbard

MG: I'm Matt Galloway and Tom Power, host of Q is back. Hello, Tom.

TOM POWER: Broadcasting from home, Matt. Even brushed my hair, even brushed my teeth for you Matt. All dolled up.

MG: All the things you need to do to be on the radio as they say. You've been speaking with one of my favourite singer-songwriters, Mr. Ben Gibbard.

TOM POWER: The great Ben Gibbard from Death Cab for Cutie. An incredibly areadite man. Eloquent, some might say. Expressive, loquacious, incredible songwriter with a gift of vernacular for sure. They're in Seattle. Seattle's obviously getting pretty hit hard by COVID-19. So what Ben's been doing as he's been writing some new music about the pandemic to raise money for organizations that help people with homelessness and precarious housing. We had a conversation about songwriting, but more about how art is an easy tool to bring people together right now and fight loneliness. Take a listen to this.

SOUNDCLIP

TOM POWER: Hi, Ben. How are you?

BEN GIBBARD: I'm good. How are you?

TOM POWER: Well, tell me about these things you've been doing. The Ben Gibbard live from home.

BEN GIBBARD: So for the past two weeks, I've been doing roughly 50 minutes or an hour, a performance every day at 4:00 p.m. Pacific Time. And the shows are pretty much by all request based. And it's been a lot of fun. I've been doing Q&As as a part of the shows and you know I always throw a cover too in there and then the Sunday shows for the last couple weeks have been all cover shows.

TOM POWER: I can tell it's great for people who love your music and you know, who love you and as you mentioned, it gives people a little bit of a break during this time. What does it do for you?

BEN GIBBARD: I mean, for me, it gives me a sense of schedule. And in a strange way, it's of normalcy. I mean. Half of my creative life or half of my professional life, I should say, is being in a room trying to write music with either by myself or, you know, arranging and and, you know, hammering out the songs with the band, the recording and music. Then the other half is being out in the world playing these songs live. So, you know, for the first couple of shows, I was nervous the same way I'd be nervous if I were about to go on stage in front of actual people who were physically there in a room with me. So, you know, selfishly, it's given me a kind of a focus around, you know, a thing to focus my day around as I am going through all this very similar. UPS and downs as any anyone else reading the news. Getting super nervous, getting very anxious. Then feeling everything will be fine. Then an hour later, realising, oh, oh, no. Things won't be fine. What if somebody I love gets it? What if somebody I love dies from it? You know, all of these kind of sort of an anxiety. Okay. We have to go to the grocery store. Is it safe to go to the grocery store? All these kind of concerns that people are having about doing the normal things in life that we we all took for granted for so long? And one of those things for me was playing live shows. It was just. And so for me to be able to have have a connection back to that. And be doing a version of that from my house is very company comforting for me as well. So when I've gotten a lot of very nice messages from people saying things like it's so nice that you're doing this for us and I almost want to respond, why? I'm also doing it for myself. You know, it's doing wonders for my mental health as well.

TOM POWER: Along with playing, he shows, you've also been writing songs. I want to play this. Take a listen to this.

[Song by Ben Gibbard]

TOM POWER: That's beautiful. That's a little bit of life under quarantine by Ben Gibbard I guess you that's a to process the sort of imaginary, fictional world that we find ourselves actually living in is to write songs about it.

BEN GIBBARD: Yeah. And I think, you know, this is, you know, writing songs is a huge part of my. Way of dealing with my own anxiety and my kind of positioning myself in the world, but also it's it's a way for me to. Can speak to what I'm seeing and in in front of me. I just got back from a nine mile run I did around the city. And because honestly, it's the easiest way to socially distance from people at this point. You know, there's nobody out there. So if you see somebody on the sidewalk, I can just run in the middle of the road because there are no cars on the streets. It's very strange, but it's is very interesting to. To be seeing the city through a different set of eyes. And that's so much a part of what was influencing that song. It's just yeah, I mean, it's this notion of, you know, there's shifts in that first first something like, you know, you say it's like Christmas when nobody's around. But yeah, that's what it feels like. It just it's a very eerie feeling. And I think early on there was kind of a strange comfort in having the city feel the quieter, but that dissipated very quickly. Obviously, when we started to understand, as I think everyone has in their own way, what the real what's really at stake here. And I think that everyone has had an most people I know have had an aha moment in the past two or three weeks, but they've realised, well, this is very serious. This is quite literally deadly serious. And we all need to we all need to kind of keep our distance from other people at this point.

TOM POWER: Well, I'm incredibly grateful for people like you who are making things and keeping people who are stuck in their houses away from at least finishing the end screen of Netflix or something like that. Thank you. Thanks so much for your time.

BEN GIBBARD: Absolutely. It was nice talking to you.

MG: That's Tom Power, speaking with Ben Gibbard. He's the front man for the band Death Cab for Cutie. Thank you, Tom, for that. And thank you for listening. That is it for The Current, an extended version of the program for today. You can catch up on anything through CBC Radio, CBC Audio, CBC Music, through the CBC Listen app. Find that wherever you find your apps. We will leave you this morning with a little bit of music from Death Cab for Cutie. This is a great song. I Will Follow You Into The Dark. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. Take care and I'll talk to you tomorrow.

[Song: "I Will Follow You Into The Dark" by Death Cab for Cutie]

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Mar. 31, 2020 episode transcript

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