The third wave of COVID-19 in Ontario began with a prescient warning from some scientists that it could turn out to be the worst yet. And they were right. Case numbers are skyrocketing, they've vastly surpassed the numbers of the first wave and perhaps it was more predictable than merely guesswork. The emergence of the variants out of the U.K., South Africa and Brazil have had their effect and continue to affect numbers since they're all considerably more infectious than the original, which was bad enough.

Toronto's hospital situation is so critical it has asked other hospitals not struck as badly to take some of their cases, so patients have been transferred accordingly out of necessity, including to Ottawa hospitals. Not that hospitals in Ottawa have been spared an overabundance of cases; they too are struggling to accommodate the increased hospitalization numbers and they're well over 100 percent capacity, the ICUs beyond crowded. There are simply not enough medical personnel available to care for all the new patients.

Given this situation and the cancelling of 'elective' surgeries, my old school chum was fortunate to have her heart valve replacement surgery proceed a month ago. She was in an ICU for a week, then transferred for another three weeks of medical care to the Baycrest Centre in north Toronto. Now she's home, has been for several weeks, but unable to really do anything physical. She was using a walker to get about, no longer anywhere near mobile for the past year or two. 

She is signed up to receive personal health worker care for one hour twice weekly. She is now 86, anything but robust to begin with, and now a semi-invalid while she's in recovery mode. She had tried to persuade the woman she employs to clean her apartment to come in weekly instead of monthly, but she had also asked the woman to sleep over and to help care for her. Little wonder the poor woman handed in a notice to my friend that she could no longer work for her.

My friend's daughter who lives in an apartment nearby offered to sleep over with her mother for one night only. Her son and her son's girlfriend, both now unemployed, live with my friend's daughter in an apartment smaller than my friend's. I asked my friend why they couldn't live with her for a short period and help her while she gains strength, but evidently such is not to be. 

People live lives fraught with complications, not the least of them emotional dissonances with members of their families, and everyone has their own singular problems to deal with. I sometimes feel as though we're living on a small disconnected island of comfort and unconcern when I hear about, see or read of the problems that some people face. Life, though, visits episode of life-challenges to all of us from time to time.

Another quiet, dark and very wet day for us, the third in a row, and more to come. And nor can we complain since up to the present, April has given us wide-open, sunny and warm days, one after another and we've taken full advantage of them. Yesterday afternoon we managed to get out with Jackie and Jillie wearing their raincoats just like us, in a brief lull in the rain. And lucky for us the rain held off until we returned home. This afternoon we carried their little jackets in our pockets just in case the rain started up again while we were out. It did, but not until we were heading back home again.

I decided to bake something fairly simple for dessert, thinking of date squares. Then it occurred to me to use oatmeal. not oat flakes in the crust, so I whirred large-flake oat flakes through a coffee grinder I keep for use other than for grinding coffee beans, until I had 2 cups of oatmeal. I added a tsp. of cinnamon, a 1/4 c. dark brown sugar, and a 1/3 c. of Becel margarine to the oatmeal and so, had the crust prepared. I cooked the 2 cups of dates in water until they were soft enough to mash, added 1/4 c. of butter, 1 tsp.vanilla and then a cup of raisins, so there was the filling. Before I put the squares into my little convection oven for a half-hour at 350 F, I sprinkled the top crust liberally with chopped pecans. Done!

It was cool enough at 6C and a light wind, to wear light jackets. I stuffed the puppies' rainjackets into the pocket of mine, and off we went to the ravine. The sky brooding grey, we saw the sun at several intervals wanly attempting to penetrate the cloud cover, but with little effect. The creek is once again full of rainwater and rushing downstream. The trails are muddy as was expected, and in some places puddles have formed over the saturated soil.

The rain and the wind have brought down scads of red maple blossoms to litter the forest floor. This is something we see every spring; first the spectacle of bright red little clusters of flowers high in the branches of the maples, then gradually, the flowers drop, their bright red punctuating the drab sameness of the early spring ground. These are the 'male' flowers, the 'female' flowers aren't red, but white or green, and cross-pollination results in clusters of seedlings taking the place of the fallen flowers, on the branches.

Concluding our hike, and just before the rain began again, we crossed the creek for the last time in our circuit,and saw the Mallard drake still cruising about, up and down the creek close to where we assume his busy mate has been sitting on eggs where they've nested. Life goes on.

 

Gloomy news; sad and bad things happening in our city, the capital of the country. And today's weather, and the dark sky reflect that troubling mood. It's raining, heavily, has been all day, and we certainly don't mind the rain. It's life-affirming, without it vegetation won't grow. And the offshoot of that is the simple fact that agriculture is hugely dependent on rain. Closer to home, so are our gardens. Although nature spurs everything that grows outdoors to come back to life in spring, she also generously provides the wherewithal so that they may. Sun and rain.

A miscalculation or misfortune of nature has also impacted our collective well-being in the most deleterious way imaginable; the biological creation of a pathogen that is programmed by nature to replicate endlessly, and to do so it seeks out a warm and moist host to enable it to. We have become a universal host to an indifferently deadly virus. Which doesn't set out to kill  us, only to use us for breeding purposes. But the vulnerable among us are impacted by its effects destroying our internal organs.

And right now, in Ottawa, the variant viruses that have been introduced to Canada from where they first were detected, the U.K., South Africa and Brazil, are wreaking havoc. The city and the province are not only in lockdown but under stay-at-home orders. And vaccination clinics have opened everywhere, including at area pharmacies to inoculate people against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Targeting first the most vulnerable in our populations and making their way down to the more general public.

Canada's late start in procuring vaccines, however, has played a part in our not having sufficient vaccine doses and a late start in vaccinating, and the result has been mass illness, and deaths amidst school closings, work-from-home alternatives, business closings, public spaces off limits, social distancing, enhanced hygiene practices and face-masking.

None of which has spared the city from so many hospitalizations that intensive care units cannot cope with the influx. "If this trend continues, the health-care system will have extreme difficulty keeping up. We have never seen anything like this before", stated the deputy medical officer of health. The sheer volume of patients and the fact that even that volume is on the increase is over capacity, representing "a completely different order of magnitude and a major challenge for how they [hospitals] would provide care", he cautioned the public.

From that dire situation, to our great good fortune in having been vaccinated, having accustomed ourselves to the need to self-isolate, having made this new method of living a part of our daily lives. And for us a vital part of our daily lives irrespective of the situation prevailing, is to maintain health and sanity by continuing to venture out daily to our nearby forested ravine. 

There, we and our two little dogs make a daily investment in the curative powers of nature, far from the anomalous dangers inherent in natural systems gone amok. It's been a rainy day, so we accoutered ourselves accordingly, including rainjackets for Jackie and Jillie. It's cooler than it has been of late, thanks to the heavily overcast conditions, but fortunately little wind to make things more uncomfortable.

The forest is brightly varnished in rain, and thirsty for whatever it can gain from the rain. The creek is swiftly moving downstream the water thrashing and foaming as it passes by. The trunks of trees glisten with colour, muted usually without the slickness that rain endows it with. Now trees that are lichen-festooned are noticeable.

And we noted also that around the trunks of trees on the forest floor, greenery is finally emerging, and the rain certainly has to be given much credit for that. Yesterday I saw no sight whatever of the wild lilies-of-the-valley, and today, ta-da! there they are. With sun and warmer temperatures in a week or so they'll also begin to bloom.

 

 

Only two weeks ago the daily case count for Ontario was tipping upward, driven mostly by the newly introduced COVID strains that had mutated first found in the United Kingdom and South Africa. Fully 40 percent of the newly reported cases were being attributed to the variants. The strain first seen in Brazil was also being identified. And now, news that a double-mutant variant that emerged in India leading to that country's soaring case count has also now been found in Ontario.

Two weeks earlier Ontario was reporting highs of 2,000 and over. And  hope was high that persuading people to register for vaccination appointments might begin to meet the challenge of increasing case numbers, even though the country was struggling to obtain enough vaccine doses to begin to make a dent in the fast-growing numbers.

People were complaining that the opportunities to register were complicated by inefficiency and by software that was seeing too many glitches; double-booking appointments so that people who had been issued verification of their appointment were then informed of cancelled appointments so they had to re-apply. That eventually got straightened out and for a few days inoculation procedures were going smoothly.

And then people complained that there were no openings. All the appointments had been taken and they were told to re-apply a few days later. At the very same time, other people were reporting that when they showed up for their appointments they were surprised to find that very few other people were showing up, the vaccines were being delivered to the scant few arms available, and some were going to waste.

Seems that some people, in their zeal to be inoculated against COVID-19 had taken to booking appointments at a number of different sites, and once they were inoculated at one, didn't bother advising the others that they had no further need to show up at the arranged appointment. That being the case, people who could be slotted in at the last moment, were not.Yesterday's reported case count had risen past 4500 people, more than doubling the number of two weeks earlier.

How our lives have been stressed and complicated by these fears and aggravations. All the more so with the grim news that case numbers are exploding, increasing exponentially with the presence of the variants and their community spread, far more communicable than the original virus, and, it would appear, causing far more serious outcomes, with hospitals strained to their limits.

Urban hospitals that have had to move non-COVID patients to other less-stressed hospitals in a near geographic region to make way for incoming COVID patients whose numbers keep growing. Each time we think things are close to being resolved, the SARS-CoV-2 virus undergoes genetic alterations and occasionally some of the resulting mutants learn to evade forward steps science makes. It's a race between vaccinating enough of the population to finally achieve the herd effect, and a swiftly-mutating virus that has the knack of staying ahead of the plans of mice and men.

 

We're beyond fortunate, personally, Not only that at age 84 we were on a priority list for vaccination, but because we live in our own home, have ample privacy, can avoid social groups and still have the opportunity to get to the out-of-doors for relief of mind, relaxation and physical exercise in one fell swoop. As we did yesterday and the day before, again today and will continue to tomorrow, with our two little dogs.

We can take our minds away from the turmoil of the global threat that the virus represents, from concerns over other world events, many of which do touch on our lives, with many more do not. We can share with one another the sights and pleasures that come with the unfolding spring season and the inevitable response of the environment.  Where surprises pop up here and there to make us wonder and delight in nature.

 

Halfway through our ramble through the trails today on a windy, partly sunny, partly cloudy 17C afternoon we realized that trout lilies have begun to make their appearance, the speckled, fish-shaped foliage beginning to emerge from the fecund leaf mass on the forest floor. Later, when we had almost completed our circuit, tiny bright spots of blue/pink caught our roving eye, in the presence of a garden plant that isn't usually seen on the forest floor. Wind-blown seeds from someone's garden of Pulmonaria, more commonly known as lungwort, with their delicate little bell-like flower heads.