THUNDER BAY – A year ago, the reality of COVID-19 hit home.
It would be more than two weeks before the District of Thunder Bay confirmed its first case, on March 27, but March 11, 2020 is a day that will live in infamy.
That’s the day the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.
Within weeks, businesses would shut down, the NBA and NHL would close up shop and face masks and social distancing became a reality.
Thunder Bay was no different.
Looking back, 365 days later, Mayor Bill Mauro said it’s hard to believe what’s happened since that declaration.
“It’s been an incredibly trying time for the community as it has been right across the country. We’ve unfortunately seen loss of life. We’ve seen isolation, where families can’t visit loved ones who are in long-term care and in the hospitals,” Mauro said.
“It’s a very, very difficult circumstance. The mental health impacts that have flowed from this, the city not being able to provide a broad range of services that people generally rely upon. There’s the financial considerations and the impacts as a result of COVID-19.”
For much of the spring and summer, Thunder Bay was in a pretty good spot. As late as Nov. 5, there were no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the district. However, case counts began to spike in and by Dec. 1, reached 100 for the first time.
Once it got into the vulnerable population, it jumped again, reaching a high of 470 active cases this past Sunday. To date, there have been 2,174 confirmed cases, all but 585 in 2021. There have also been 37 deaths.
Schools are closed to in-person learning for the second time since the pandemic arrived and the district remains in Grey-Lockdown, after a two-week reprieve in Red-Control on the colour-coded provincial framework.
As bad as it seems at times, Mauro said it could have been worse.
“By and large, the people I do believe, have been doing exactly what they’ve needed to do throughout the entirety of the pandemic. And so you say thank you to them and you wait for the vaccines to arrive, which is ultimately the answer that’s going to get us through this,” the mayor said.
It’s been a tremendously trying time on the business community, said Thunder Bay Chamber of Commerce president Charla Robinson.
Non-essential businesses were forced to close in the early days of COVID-19, and while most returned to business in the summer, a number closed their doors for good when Ontario Premier Doug Ford ordered the first shutdown.
Dozens more could face a similar fate if the current lockdown doesn’t soon come to an end.
But Robinson wants to focus on the positive, where possible.
“I think the first word that comes to mind is resilience,” she said. “So many businesses are still struggling, but they’re still going. They’re still finding new ways to do what they do. Many of them have really had to change their business model.
When the severity of the situation became apparent, Robinson said she was taking phone calls from business owners who were in tears. Thankfully government programs helped many entrepreneurs weather the storm
That said, she’s worried it’s a year in and at some point soon, tax deferments and loan repayments are going to come due.
“At some point, you need to pay that back, and that’s when the crunch will come. Certainly this extra lockdown now has been detrimental to many businesses who probably in November were feeling they could get through this, that they’d been through the worst of it,” Robinson said.
“Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case.”
Robinson, like Mauro, is holding out hope the vaccine will put an end to the worst of the pandemic, maybe as early as the summertime.
