112 Through the mask: My COVID-19 story

Henry Walsh

Hi future reader, this is my COVID story.  

When COVID-19 was first reported in December of 2019 I was 15 years old, in grade 10 living in Norwood, Ontario. During the initial reporting of the virus, there were rumblings of my schoolmates talking about how it was going to change our world in a big way, months before the first lockdown. Then the Friday before March break, the school board and government announced an extra two weeks of March break. Little did we know that the extra two weeks were only the start of something much longer. After the three-week break the school announced that we would be going to virtual school for the remainder of the semester.

The first summer during COVID-19, I worked on my neighbor’s farm stacking square bales on sunny days and on our own farm on rainy days. Lock down in the summer was challenging to stay isolated because there was always work to be done and everyone was short of helping hands, so I was always traveling around with my brother to the different farms to work. As was my father, he is a large animal vet that works primarily on cows, and he would travel an area from Kingston to Peterborough, Ontario seeing farmers and their families. My father couldn’t stay isolated because his job required him to move around to different farms and treat sick cattle while also working on routine pregnancy checks. 

When September came around, I started grade 11, we started in school in quadmesters, where we would work on 1 course for 4 periods every day for 1 week for and then switch to another course the next week. We did this until we got to Christmas, after Christmas we transitioned to online school because the health minister was concerned about everyone meeting up for Christmas. After the Christmas break virtual school was weird, and every couple of months we would go back to school for a couple weeks, then the case count would jump back up and the school board would send us back to virtual classes. I liked the quadmesters more than online school because it was more streamlined and I could follow a routine, and online school was the opposite.  When we were back at school, we had to complete a survey every morning before walking into the school that asked us all about how we were feeling or if we traveled. We had to show that to the teacher before we walked into the classroom. This was common practice as we also had the same protocol when we went to the rink before playing hockey, or doing any other sport.

The confusion and lack of concrete scheduling because of the pandemic caused a lot of mental health issues for me and my friends at school. Online schooling allowed for an inflation of grades and gap in knowledge for some of my classes. In my hometown of Norwood, the local high school was 200 people, making my class 50 people for all 3 streams of high school. In the second half of the school year when COVID-19 sent the world into a lockdown, I was in a grade 11 functions. I was in this class because I had taken summer school the previous summer so I could take all 3 maths to apply to university. This was common practice at Norwood because the grade 12 functions course was only offered once every 2 years because we didn’t have enough students to fill the class. When the lockdowns started in March of 2020, the lessons of grade 11 functions slowed down and the teacher checked out of the school year. We didn’t have an exam, and we barely learned anything after the school went online. This was good for semester because we could coast, but what we didn’t realize was that it was going to come back to bite us the next year. My Grade 12 functions class started with 15 people on day 1 and after 2 weeks there were 7 students in the class; the other 8 had transferred out of it, because they didn’t need it or because the learning curve was too great for them.

My overall COVID-19 experience was good, I am very lucky to live in a place where there are tons of wide-open spaces, with lots of work to keep busy with. My life didn’t really change drastically because my parents still went to work as veterinarians, and my brother and I still went to school. I just had much more time on my hands when we transitioned to online schooling. During this free time, I learned a lot about football, I became hyper fixated on it for the entirety of the pandemic. My biggest challenge relating to the pandemic was not being able to go out and play football on a team, so I was confined to working on my skills at home or going to the field with small groups of people to throw the football around and work on drills and skills without playing in an actual game or practice. I guess all that time obsessing over football paid off because I now play quarterback at McMaster, and I am a part of an awesome group of guys that I was missing out on during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The reoccurring theme of my COVID-19 experience was secrecy, if one of my schoolmates was confirmed to be infected with COVID-19 they would just stop showing up to school for the 2-week quarantine period and then come back unannounced, they wouldn’t tell anyone. Nobody talked about it, it felt like people in the town wanted to hide that they got it or cover it up that they were infected with it – like there was a stigma attached to COVID-19. After talking with people about their COVID-19 experience, there were a lot of people who said they got sick and assumed it was COVID-19 without actually reporting the case to the public health unit or even testing themselves. I always had a feeling that there were always more cases than what was reported, but I fear the actual number of people infected is far greater than what we imagine.