The helpers, stuck at home, who cannot help during the COVID-19 pandemic

National Post, 20 March 2020

Food banks tend to rely on many volunteers for the receiving, sorting, packing and distribution of food. What happens when 20 volunteers who worked together in one room are reduced to six in order to keep safe distances?

What happens when the helpers can’t help? That is a pressing question across the land and around the world. It’s what makes the response to the coronavirus different, even unique.

It has a particular resonance with front-line personnel — doctors, nurses, public health officials and the like. If they are quarantined for sickness or as a precautionary measure, vital services are at put at risk.

Yet there are other helpers, not on the front lines of health care, but of a community that cares. And what happens if those helpers can’t help?

Rex Murphy spoke of that network of caring earlier this week.

“This is a time to recall the character of our nation,” Rex wrote. “It works on the notion of neighbour: the person next door, who helped with the snow shovelling; the farmer who came over to help with the harvest; the person in the apartment building who checked on the elderly lady; or the guy who gave you a drive when you had no car. There are more helpers than exploiters; more fine people than weasels; more kind than indifferent; and as always in all these provinces and territories, more people of bigger character and larger hearts than their opposite.”

That’s true of Canada. It’s true of most places. That’s what happens in times of natural disaster — Murphy mentioned the 2016 Fort McMurray, Alta., fires and the 1998 ice storm in Ontario and Quebec. It happened too in Gander, N.L., after 9/11. People rally around, communities come together.

The coronavirus pandemic is radically different. The public health advice — mandate, really — is not to rally around but to stay at home, not to come together but to stay apart. The national instinct — the human instinct — may well be to rush to the aid of those in need, but what happens when the elderly, the frail, the vulnerable and the lonely need you to keep away?

Continue reading at the National Post:
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/raymond-j-de-souza-the-helpers-stuck-at-home-who-cannot-help-during-the-covid-19-pandemic