5 years after first cases, Manitoba families who lost loved ones to COVID-19 still feel missed moments

Retired nurse Valerie Alderson doesn't find herself thinking back to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic anymore, but when someone brings it up, "it's a flashback of what has happened."

That includes the death of her 82-year-old dad, Lloyd Hodgins, who was sent to the hospital after breaking his hip in a fall and died not long after of COVID-19 complications, in November 2021, "all alone, without anybody," because of pandemic rules at the time restricting hospital visitors. 

"Both my sister and I were vaccinated. We could have had our masks on, visors on, gown on, gloves on to be with him," said Alderson, 63.

"I always think it's important that when you have a loved one go … for someone to be there, whether it's to hold their hand, to wipe their face, to sing a song, to read poetry, whatever. Because the hearing is the last thing that goes on any person that's passing away, and then they're gone."

Justin Dusik's family also went through that experience.

The 34-year-old said he never got the chance to say goodbye to his grandparents, who both died in their 80s within less than two weeks of each other in 2021.

When his grandpa died, his three sons had to watch over a video call as he took his last breaths, Dusik said.

"To me, it's almost heartless, where you don't get the basic human decency to be in person to comfort that loved one during a tough time in their life or to, you know, hold a hand, say your goodbyes," Dusik said.

"But during the pandemic, we didn't get that opportunity. So people passed away alone. People passed away without saying their goodbyes or letting their last thoughts be known."

While both have been able to move on, they said they still in a way carry those times with them almost five years after Manitoba's first presumptive COVID-19 cases were reported in March 2020.

"In the end, you can't reconcile that. You never get that opportunity again with that person," Dusik said. "But there was nothing we could do about it at the time."

It's a phenomenon that became fairly common during parts of the pandemic — and a policy choice one advocate says "really broke people emotionally" and that may have been approached differently, in hindsight.

"It's hard to explain the terror that you have by having one of your loved ones taken away or locked up and having absolutely no idea if they're alive or dead or if they're in a critical condition," said Laura Tamblyn Watts, CEO of national seniors' advocacy organization CanAge.

"We had people for whom their spouses were hospitalized, and they couldn't really even get a hold of them, not even on the phone, to find out what was happening to them — and then days later, finding out that they were on ventilators."

Tamblyn Watts said looking back, "one of the things we learned very quickly was how important social connection really was," calling it "as important as really the medical care itself." 

Instead of relying on "blanket no-visitor policies," she said facilities like hospitals could have instead focused on reducing risk by using good hand washing and personal protective equipment and ensuring everyone was vaccinated.

'Huge psychological impact'

Another effect of those policies was felt by health-care workers, who were forced to be gatekeepers of people's access to their loved ones.

"The level of trauma that they were experiencing was also something that we didn't talk enough about," Tamblyn Watts said.

Alderson, who during the pandemic worked as a home-care nurse, said she knows first-hand the "huge psychological impact" the pandemic had on everyone, from workers to patients.

During the height of visitor restrictions, there were days when she may have been the only person some of her patients saw, she said.

"They felt isolated," she said. "They couldn't go to church. They couldn't walk down the hallway in the apartment building to go visit their friend."

Dusik said while to the best of his knowledge, the hospital staff who dealt with his grandparents "were quite accommodating and did their best to be compassionate as professionals," he thinks they "might have been a little hampered by the policies at hand or dictated by the government."

"I know doctors and nurses are human just like the rest of us, so if they would have been able to accommodate those requests, I think most of them would have," he said.

While the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic's effects may now seem far in the past, some — like retired nurse Alderson — said they worry about how Manitoba's strained health-care system will address what comes in the future.

"I fear what's going to happen in 25 years, when I may need it more than what I have now," she said.

She hopes facilities like long-term care homes, hospitals and clinics "have learned from their experience in regards to protecting the staff and the patients."

Seniors' advocate Tamblyn Watts said she also worries about some of the more recent changes to policy around mitigating the effects of COVID-19, including the Public Health Agency of Canada's announcement that the provinces and territories will take over purchasing their own supplies of vaccines.

"This was a defining moment in our lives. And if you look at the things that we need to learn from, COVID-19 is not something that we can turn our heads away from.… It's still around, and so is RSV and so is pneumonia, and so are all kinds of other infectious diseases," Tamblyn Watts said.

"We'll break our health-care system with another pandemic unless we put preventive health in place. And we are doing the very opposite right now."