text: Hinshaw woke up at 5 a.m. for months. She began her day by working at home before heading to her office. There, she'd read the latest SARS-CoV-2 science and use it to lead decisions on everything from testing strategies to lockdown measures to industry closures. She announced those decisions daily at 3:30 p.m. Back at home, she'd work until 10 or 11 p.m. Then, repeat. Like the virus, Hinshaw's routine was constant and relentless, obliterating breaks, balance, and weekends. Characteristically humble and gracious, she credits her team and her husband, her "greatest cheerleader," for helping her keep it together. Her mother also helped big time, looking after Hinshaw's two elementary school–aged children for half the week at her own house and half the week at her daughter's. Hinshaw's faith tradition grounded her, infusing her with the belief that she is always part of something bigger than herself, one chain-link of connection with the whole. Still, there were days when she didn't feel so Zen. It didn't happen often, but there were times where she had pushed and pushed and pushed for something—or, conversely, had been pushed—until she'd finally had enough. She's thankful those rare times happened when she was with supportive people. She could let it out, cry in her office, wipe her eyes, pick herself up, and get back to it. "Honestly," she said, "I think it's important to cry"—to release the grief, to admit despair. "So much suffering has happened—not just as a direct result of the infection, but also the impact on people."
  
  For Hinshaw, the hardest thing is knowing that, despite all the long hours and careful evaluation, she couldn't protect everyone from COVID-19. The second hardest thing is knowing that the same wise decisions she made to protect Albertans rippled out and caused harm: mass unemployment; mass isolation; and, carried on those twin waves like flotsam, a national increase in drug overdoses and substance abuse, in suicide and self-harm, and in domestic violence. Hinshaw became the symbol of both sides of the pandemic—the protective shield and the unintentional wrecking ball. In many other provinces, she said, a few individuals assumed the public face of COVID-19. In Alberta, however, "it's just been me." Consequently, Hinshaw gets a lot of email. Strangers share their deep rage, their concern, their praise, their gratitude, their myriad definitive opinions on what she should do going forward (here, she lets out a sharp, self-deprecating laugh): "Resign." She does read all the feedback, and sifts out everything she finds useful, even when it's critical. In the first month, someone wrote to tell her that, while they appreciated her updates, the daily COVID-19 death toll made it seem like those losses were the only ones that mattered. Since then, Hinshaw has consciously acknowledged that many people are grieving in a time during which grief is especially complicated; she has extended her sympathies to them all. Another person wrote to say that when she was talking about following public safety measures, she only used the word you, which felt like a gigantic pointing finger. Hinshaw switched to we. She has checked her tone for lecturing, for shaming, for anything that does not suggest we are all in it together.
  
  "I always want to contextualize," Hinshaw told me, "that I'm well aware not every Albertan loves me." Mostly, it doesn't matter. While she appreciates the accolades, she is not on the podium to make herself look good. She is not up there to elevate herself. She stands up there nearly every day simply to share the best information she has, and the best recommendations she can give based on it. If she's wrong, she'll say that too. It's been strange for her to ascend into the public consciousness. When she took the job in January 2019, she knew that she'd have to speak with media. She knew there would be days she would stand at a podium in front of a background of alternating draped maple leaves and folded Rocky Mountains and share important public health information. Like everything else about the scale of the pandemic, though, this magnitude of visibility previously felt impossible. She's had to learn how to express her natural compassion but still build boundaries—to accept she cannot solve everyone's problems. Like other stars, she's also had to learn to keep a part of herself tucked away from the public eye. "I feel like the way I cope with that attention is to recognize that all of that attention is on the Dr. Hinshaw role," she said. "It's almost like, in my own circle, I can then slip out of it and just be me."
  
  The same calm, measured principles she exhibits in press conferences have likewise helped to guide her through the stratosphere. "I've committed to being honest and transparent," she told me, "and to acknowledging when I make mistakes or when something doesn't go well." She thinks that this, more than anything, is what's resonated with Albertans: her ability to concede imperfection. From a lot of people, such sentiments can sound strikingly like a line, a political platitude. And, admittedly, she's said something similar in several other interviews. Coming from Hinshaw, though, it sounds as genuine and down to earth as a Sunday dinner.
  
  For starters, it's true. On May 1, she opened one of her daily briefings with an apology. "In the announcement I made earlier this week regarding visitor restrictions in continuing care, I did not ensure that operators had been fully consulted or notified prior to the policy change," she said. "I am sorry." On the last day in August, she apologized for the confusion her back-to-school updates sparked. And it isn't just that Hinshaw can admit a wrong step. It's that she urges compassion instead of fear, community instead of blame. When she announced a new outbreak of fifty-seven cases at a Calgary-based Ethiopian church, she stressed that members of the church deserved support, not stigma. "An outbreak can occur anywhere," she said, "and those involved need our compassion." That's just the type of leader Hinshaw is. On the day we chatted over video, she was at home. Reaching for a Kleenex, she explained that she had a runny nose and sore throat, so she'd done the responsible thing and self-isolated. She's that kind of leader, too.
  
  ⁂
  
  [ A HIGH TOLL ]
  
   "There was not one person who died alone. I made sure of that."
  
  —Roisin O'Brien, care aide
  
  Death has always been a part of Roisin O'Brien's job. The twenty-seven-year-old had been working at a Vancouver long-term care centre for nearly four years when COVID-19 hit in mid-March. She often sat with people who were in palliative care. She would hold their hand, stroke their hair, make sure they knew she was with them at the end. Many residents didn't have family, either in the city or at all, and O'Brien never wanted them to look around at an empty room. So she'd sit and wait, whether the last breath came in half an hour or an entire shift later. Sometimes it was peaceful, and sometimes it wasn't; no matter what, O'Brien was there. Her job as a care aide is rarely easy. There can be a lot of workplace violence: she's been called names, and right off the top of her head, she can think of at least six times an angry or scared resident has hit her. But this part made it all worth it. O'Brien liked knowing she could spend time with her clients, offer a kind word. She liked knowing that nobody under her care would die alone. She liked knowing that, in that final moment, she did what she could.
  
  As the outbreak ripped through the country, hitting B.C. in late January, O'Brien began to stay home more and more. Her fiancé took over grocery-shopping duties. She didn't want to be the person who brought the virus into her care home. At the same time, she knew that chronic short-staffing often meant people showed up to work sick. Maybe they guiltily dismissed their runny nose as a little sniffle, their sore throat as feeling just a bit scratchy. They didn't want to leave their co-workers hanging. They couldn't afford to pass up the hours. They could manage a shift, they reasoned; they just needed to wear a disposable mask. Before COVID-19, O'Brien had done it, too, figuring that skipping her shift would do more harm. That thinking changed on March 7 when Bonnie Henry announced a COVID-19 outbreak at Lynn Valley Care Centre in North Vancouver, confirming both residents and staff had tested positive. The next night, one of the facility's residents, an eighty-three-year-old man, died, becoming Canada's first COVID-19 death. O'Brien's own care home called a mandatory staff meeting in response. Sixty people crammed into a 35-square-metre room. They decided to start restricting visitors from out of town. They would start asking questions about whether people had recently been abroad. There would be no more coming in sick.
  
  "It turns out, we didn't really have to worry because the virus was already there," said O'Brien. "In hindsight, over half of the people in that room had COVID." Shortly after the meeting, she took an overtime shift on another floor. There was a man there who was vomiting and had diarrhea. O'Brien was worried because she knew his symptoms matched some of the more severe COVID-19 cases. She had no PPE because she hadn't been provided with it, and so she entered his room without any. She breathed the same air and touched her fingertips to his skin. When his condition worsened, she called the ambulance. The paramedics arrived in full virus-armour, "completely gowned up." O'Brien had one scalpel-sharp thought: What if this is our first case? The next day, she found out it was. She immediately took her temperature: 38.7 degrees Celsius. A moderate fever. She turned around and headed to a testing clinic. Two days later she got her results and, to her surprise, they were negative. She called her care centre right away and offered to take a shift. In the intervening days, the virus had played hopscotch through the centre. Both residents and facility healthcare workers were sick. She'd work the floor that housed all of the former, she told her supervisors. Hours after offering, she was at work. "And that," she said, "is when all hell broke loose."
  
  Every resident who was sick lived on the dementia floor. Keeping them all quarantined in their rooms was impossible. If they were well enough, they wanted to walk around, they wanted to give O'Brien hugs, they wanted to be close. They touched everything because they didn't understand why they shouldn't. O'Brien would look at empty carts where the PPE was supposed to be and feel a helpless kind of anger boil. She wore the same surgical mask and worked double shift after double shift, from 3 p.m. right on through to 7 a.m. On a normal evening pre-COVID, there would be five care aides, including her, and one nurse. Now they were lucky to have three. Direction from management seemed to change from hour to hour. O'Brien was used to having a list of twelve residents to care for; she could check in several times a night with them, make sure they had everything they needed, stop and chat. Now, in one eight-hour shift, she had to look after forty—changing their adult diapers, sheets, and other incontinence products, washing their bodies and hair, feeding them. She couldn't do it all to the standard she wanted. She didn't have time to wash people's faces. If someone needed changing, she'd do it once, then put them right to bed.
  
  O'Brien had never cried over her job before, but she did now, after every shift and sometimes during them. She'd come home, take a shower, cry, eat, sleep, and then do it all over again. She constantly felt sick to her stomach. Usually, she told me, she tries to distance herself from the tough stuff, summoning the grit to keep going with the mantra This is my job. But on the second or third day of working the designated COVID-19 floor, she stopped dissociating, stepped back, and let her brain take a big-picture snapshot of the scene around her. What she saw was horrific. Oh my god, she thought. This is neglect. This isn't right at all.