Five years after pandemic began, COVID-19 has left death, illness, isolation in its wake

June Muir had just returned from a trip to New York to help a friend move when the warnings started turning up in the media: If you've been out of the country, stay home.

It was early March, 2020, and COVID-19 was in the process of going from being a relatively unknown virus with little presence in Canada to a significant enough threat to shut down public gatherings for the better part of two years.

Muir, who runs the UHC-Hub of Opportunities, decided to stay home from work the next day just in case.

That decision may have saved lives.

Muir became one of the first people in the Windsor-Essex region to contract COVID-19.

"I was home for three months," she said.

"It was just a real nasty, nasty virus."

March 11 marks the fifth anniversary of the declaration by the World Health Organization that COVID-19 was a global pandemic. 

More than 60,000 Canadians dead

By September of last year, the virus had killed more than 60,000 Canadians, and more than two million people were living with long-term effects of the disease as of June 2023.

Around 600,000 Canadian adults missed an average of 24 days of work because of what's often called long COVID. Around 100,000 had been unable to return to work because of their symptoms. 

Muir initially experienced crushing fatigue that she chalked up to having over-exerted herself during her trip.

Then came the fever, the trouble breathing, the coughing, the lack of appetite, and ultimately, the positive COVID test.

"You're tired, you're weak, and you're scared because at that time, nobody knew anything," she said.

"You start to think, 'Am I going to die? Am I going to be OK?'"

Muir was seriously ill for approximately two weeks, she said, and it took her a full three months to produce two consecutive negative PCR tests.

While she functions much better than many so-called COVID long-haulers, she said she's never felt as well as she did before she got sick.

"I would say maybe I'm at 80 per cent to 85 per cent of that energy," she said.

"I think that I definitely was a long-hauler because I coughed and I coughed and coughed and coughed. Anything that I had after COVID seemed to intensify."

Muir said her experience with COVID has made her realize that life is precious, and it can change in an instant.

That was the experience for Bev Walkling, a retired public health nurse from Sarnia.

Walkling lives with rheumatoid disease and kidney disease, two conditions that place her at high risk from COVID.

She no longer goes out in public without a mask on; she doesn't eat in restaurants; and she does her best to avoid crowded areas.

"It's been isolating," she said.

"I've felt a sense of what I would call 'moral injury.' … I've had people just say to me, 'Life is too short. I choose to live my life. You don't have to do that if you don't want to.' As if I don't recognize that life is short. I probably recognize it more than most." 

The chief of staff at Windsor Regional Hospital said some staff still suffer with post-traumatic stress disorder from the early days of the pandemic.

"There were many lives lost," said Dr. Wassim Saad

"The mental health impact, I think, still lingers for many people. It was very traumatic."

The darkest point, he said, came as staff struggled with critical shortages of personal protective equipment and ventilators to help keep patients alive. 

"There wasn't a lot of hope in sight," he said.

But COVID also served as a tipping point for health workers when it came to taking care of themselves, Saad said.

For years, nobody spoke about burnout.

"We were always expected to keep going no matter what," he said. "And we always did, but I think COVID-19 was an inflection point and really a breaking point for many people, and now I think people take their mental health a lot more seriously."