text: Throughout the course of the pandemic, I've heard many variations of the same joke-but-not-a-joke: time is broken. There is so much happening, all at once, that every day feels like it's been stuffed with a whole year's worth of events—kind of like a pandemic olive. But also nothing is happening. What even are days of the week? Does it matter if it's a Tuesday or a Saturday? Days blend into each other, mixed by loneliness, exhaustion, isolation, loss. While writing Women of the Pandemic, I felt that time-bending keenly. Throughout the summer, as I interviewed dozens of women, it looked like Canada was flattening the curve. Empty streets filled. People appeared on patios, suddenly, as if by teleportation, laughing and drinking cold beers, chilled wine. We flocked to malls, gyms, weddings, potlucks, baseball diamonds, and soccer fields. With trepidation we planned for school, transforming classrooms and prepping remote learning. Public health measures softened, allowing openings and larger crowds. Our own rule-following slid, too. Maybe we were in denial, wrapped in dangerous conspiracies and twinning beliefs that the virus wouldn't touch us, that it wasn't that bad. Maybe we thought we were invincible. Maybe we simply missed our families, our friends, our regular lives.
  
  Multiple infectious disease experts had told me that, in the entire history of pandemics, there had never been one that escaped the second wave. I knew this from researching disease across the centuries. The bubonic plague, cholera, the so-called Spanish flu, H1N1, SARS, and so on. Call it a wave or a phase or an unfortunate comeback, most disease outbreaks returned, ebbing and then crashing, seemingly disappearing and then reappearing elsewhere like a sneezing Houdini. Still, at one point this summer, I began to hope that by the time this book was published the pandemic would essentially be over in Canada. That wilfully naive hope bubbled into the fall, until reality popped it on September 28. That day, Ontario, my home province, recorded the highest number of new COVID-19 cases in a single day since the beginning of the pandemic, hitting seven hundred. It would go on to break that record a few days after that, and would break the new record a few days after that. On October 25, it reported more than one thousand cases in a single day. Around that time, Canada itself passed a grim milestone of two hundred thousand total cases, and our increasing daily count prompted the European Union to remove us from its "white list" of countries from which travellers can visit unrestricted. By the end of the month, the virus had killed over ten thousand people in Canada. People cancelled Thanksgiving plans, then Halloween trick-or-treating. Winter holidays seemed up in the air, and even Trudeau suggested Christmas might be cancelled. And, of course, weeks later, it was.
  
  As I write this, in the first days of 2021, nearing ten months into the pandemic, I can honestly say I have no idea what state the world will be in when Women of the Pandemic is published. By the time we rung in the new year, a total of about 85.1 million people, worldwide, had contracted the virus. Roughly 47.8 million of them had recovered, and 1.84 million of them had died. In Canada, cases among twentysomethings have surged, surpassing the number of cases of those in the eighty-plus age range near the end of August. A month before that, a globally focused study revealed that COVID-19 affected more middle-aged people than initially assumed. In England, it found, a person aged fifty-five to sixty-four "who gets infected with SARS-CoV-2 faces a fatality risk that is more than 200 times higher than the annual risk of dying in a fatal car accident." Meanwhile, back home, many provinces seemed hesitant to reinstate lockdown measures, and moved slowly. One day before Halloween, more than a dozen doctors in Manitoba published a letter urging the government to once more shut down the province. "We're well past the stage where even a robust community response will significantly slow the epidemic," they wrote in the Winnipeg Free Press. "Fortunately, your government has already shown us what needs to be done." Perhaps unfortunately, however, few seemed to want to do it all over again—even as many doctors warned of an overloaded system. Bonnie Henry advised a press conference at the end of October, "We are in the danger zone and we need to take the action to make it okay," but added that a renewed lockdown wouldn't be one of the measures.
  
  By mid-November, Henry had changed her mind. On the nineteenth, the province entered a social lockdown, once again suspending events and social gatherings. Bars and restaurants were allowed to remain open (although not for New Year's Eve celebrations). A beleaguered Manitoba enacted even stricter measures that same month, largely closing everything but schools and daycare. Restaurants once more moved to take-out only, and retailers to online shopping and curbside pick-up. My home province, Ontario, waited longer to rewind time, first issuing a renewed and adjusted lockdown in hotspots, like Toronto, before eventually extending the orders provincewide on December 26. As emergency room doctor Kanna Vela said when I spoke to her again that month, the rising case counts that sparked all those closures had renewed the sense of fear for many frontline workers: "It's fear we won't beat this thing, fear more people will continue to die, fear we will run out of hospital beds and ventilators—something that is actually happening right now." She felt immense guilt, too, every day wondering if she'd bring the virus home to her family. But she also felt pride and obligation and a sense of privilege that, as the second wave crushed Canada, she was able to help many people who were at their most vulnerable.
  
  After close to a year spent talking to essential workers and women on the front line, to those who've lost their livelihoods and their well-being, it was hard not to feel dismayed, and even a little angry, as I watched our case count steadily slope upwards in the final months of 2020. There is a reason the term doomscrolling seems so apt—we can't stop reading the news, even though we know it's depressing, disheartening, and just plain bad. I can see why some would want to turn away. I have, by now, spent months immersing myself in COVID-19 news, and the knowledge can be suffocating. No matter your vantage point, watching the pandemic unfold can often feel like riding a looping rollercoaster that's also screeching toward a cliff. The problem, of course, is that even if we safely parachute off the world's least fun ride, it's still going to crash over the edge. And there is a stark difference between understandably shutting our eyes for a few moments and pretending there is nothing to be afraid of at all. Dampening the second wave is our collective governments' responsibility, but let's face it, it's also ours.
  
  If the end of 2020 saw overwhelming case counts and the terrifying emergence of a new, more contagious strain, it also saw hope. Canada approved and bought two vaccines in December, with the rollout beginning that same month. Still, as we know, that rollout is far from instantaneous—or easy. Each province and territory has planned out its own phases, deciding who gets their shot in the arm when. It's likely the general public won't all get their shots until the end of September 2021, and that's if the rollout goes smoothly in each jurisdiction. Until then, we have another long slog ahead of us as we try to keep everyone safe from COVID-19.
  
  Somewhere in the past, we were promised flying cars and jetpacks, and instead we got a pandemic that fractured the world. Many people have described 2020 as the worst year ever. I get it. I have, too. Unfortunately, the start of 2021 hasn't given us a blank slate. Even as we have a sense of renewed hope, the virus is still very much here and it can still feel like everything is out of our control. But that isn't entirely true: we can control how we move forward. We can control how we rebuild.
  
  Memory is an unreliable thing. We can often erase or minimize problems with which we don't want to grapple. In this manner, we've allowed the measles and other preventable diseases to return. We were surprised at how strikingly similar the 1918 flu pandemic was to today's pandemic, both in its global sweep and in the way that strong public health measures had the ability to strike it down. When we recover from any illness, pandemic-wrought or not, we may even let our sense of how bad it was, how violently sick we were, fade. When the H1N1 pandemic struck, I was working as a reporter in Iqaluit, Nunavut, where people were especially hard-hit by the virus. I got it, too, and my cough became so chronic, and so vicious, that I eventually began to hack up blood—a side effect that lingered for weeks. I didn't think about it much in the intervening years. As for forgetting, you might think that's fairly harmless. But it can become dangerous in its own way. Say, the way much of colonial Canada dismissed—and didn't learn from—the H1N1 pandemic because Indigenous, Northern, and remote communities bore the brunt of the outbreak. Or the ways in which too little change took place to prevent healthcare workers from getting sick, or suffering from the mental health fallout, post-SARS. How, on a wider scale, we didn't heed the many warnings from virologists and other experts that, if things didn't change, the next big pandemic would be a zoonotic one; that we should prepare for it. (As COVID-19 proved, many countries didn't.) These are the ways in which our dominant culture rewrites, or steamrolls over, other narratives. These are the ways in which we practise our own forgetting. It isn't always malicious, but it is usually unwise.
  
  This book covers a moment in time—a small, but I think important, part of the pandemic. I wrote Women of the Pandemic because I believe it is essential that we remember these women and this point in history. Their bravery, their losses, their creativity, their activism, and their resilience will help lead us forward as we recover this year, and the next, and all the years after. We don't know what will happen to the world as we try to define a new normal. But we do know that, if we forget again, whatever we build next will be poorer for it. At the end of October, Theresa Tam released her annual report on the state of public health in Canada. Needless to say, it was unlike any annual health report before it. More than that, the report acknowledged, in writing, that we were not quite "all in it together"; many populations and groups suffered more than others. Tam also offered a new perspective on certain often-quoted statistics—for example, the fact that the overwhelming majority of those who were hospitalized, or died in hospital, had underlying conditions. Tam reframed the weird reassurance that only the previously unhealthy are at risk for what it was: a failure in the health system to care for those pre-existing conditions. Many of those people were sick because they were already at risk, doubly neglected.
  
  The nod was refreshing. So too was the rest of the report, which stressed the interconnected nature of the pandemic and the necessarily interconnected nature of any proposed recovery plan. "The bottom line," she wrote in the report, is that "no one is protected until everyone is protected." It's a flip on the "we're all in it together" line, and one that feels not only more honest but more helpful. At a later press conference, Tam expanded on the sentiment, adding that she sees COVID-19 as a catalyst for collaboration among health, social, and economic sectors, as well as different levels of governance. She went on to echo something many of the women I interviewed also asked me: "Why can't we have those governance structures beyond the crisis and into recovery?" It's questions like this from those in power that give me hope for our future, in pandemic times and beyond.