Image Credit: Mel Rothenburger

By Mel Rothenburger

ARMCHAIR MAYOR

ROTHENBURGER: I’m an old man, and you’re going to kill me with COVID-19

Jul 25, 2020 | 6:44 AM

I’M 76 YEARS OLD and I want to know why you’re trying to kill me.

You know who you are. You’re the one who doesn’t wear a mask because you feel embarrassed, believe it’s somehow against your human rights, or you just can’t be bothered.

You’re the one who squeezes up close to me in the lineup, or who brushes by me in the store or coffee shop without a thought to social distancing.

If you give me COVID-19, I’ll die. It might take weeks as the doctors do their best to stave off the pneumonia by drugging me into a coma and shoving a ventilator tube down my throat.

But I won’t have a chance. People my age can’t beat this disease. We have lowered immune systems and more chronic health conditions than we can count on both hands.

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I’ll probably never see my loved ones again because they won’t be allowed into my hospital room. I will die alone.

As I go around town attending to the necessities of life, I see a lot of folks my age wearing masks. Old fogies like myself wear them not because we think it’s going to save us. We know it won’t. But we know we could be saving somebody else from getting it from us if we’re asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic, as so many are.

The current rise in numbers of COVID-19 cases is being blamed in large part on young people who ignore social distancing and masking because they can’t resist getting together and treating life as though it’s the same as it used to be.

Dr. Teresa Tam told young people to smarten up Friday, pointing out that most of the new cases in the past two weeks have been people under 39, who can spread it to older folks like me who can’t fight it like they can.

Why is it that people in their 60s and 70s and 80s are concerned about the health of others but don’t get the same respect in return? I’m generalizing, of course. A lot of young people observe the protocols, and I admire and thank them for it.

There are also a lot of older people who don’t wear masks or social distance and I don’t fully understand why that is.

I like the way Coun. Kathy Sinclair put it this week. She says that when she goes out in public she assumes she’s got asymptomatic COVID-19 and conducts herself accordingly to ensure she doesn’t spread it around.

Why can’t everyone do that? I’m not a mask Nazi. When nobody else is around us it’s obviously fine to go maskless. I don’t wear mine when I’m driving, except at drive-thrus. I do wear it walking down the street, though they say the chances of swapping droplets as we pass by each other are low.

Meetings are somewhat contentious. I was at one last week in which almost half the people in the room wore masks even though they were well separated from each other. We probably didn’t need the masks but there’s nothing wrong with being sure.

I definitely wear one in the grocery store, though most don’t, nor do they seem capable of understanding the arrows on the floor.

I don’t take public transportation but if I did I’d wear one.

It’s OK to forget your mask in the car once in a while; occasionally I find myself going into a store having forgotten my own. But it’s unlikely the 90 per cent of the population who don’t wear masks just has a bad memory.

It’s also unlikely the 90 per cent will get around to it any time soon, but think about it — if we all wore masks, and paid attention to the other stuff like hand washing we could get this thing under control very quickly. The general rule for mask wearing is incredibly simple — do it whenever you’re less than six feet away from someone (though the World Health Organization says it’s possible to spread the virus as far as 14 feet away).

Here in B.C., Dr. Bonnie Henry can’t bring herself to crack down on the slackers. She was initially guilty of downplaying the effectiveness of masks, convincing us there was little point. Now she acknowledges their importance in preventing spread but doesn’t have it in her to make them mandatory.

Clearly, though, she’s frustrated about the outbreak in Kelowna, and worried about the uptick in numbers during the last couple of weeks, just as Teresa Tam is. She wears a mask. Justin Trudeau wears one. Even Donald Trump wears one now, at least for photo ops.

Basically, though, it’s up to you and me.

I’d like to reach 77 but right now I’m not sure I’ll make it. So back to you — if you’d quit being convinced of your own invincibility and realize “we’re all in this together,” I’d have a better chance.

Mel Rothenburger is a former mayor of Kamloops and a retired newspaper editor. He is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a director on the Thompson-Nicola Regional District board. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.