Life disrupted as COVID-19 arrived in Niagara

This is Niagara’s pandemic story.

The café owner who just renovated her business after a record-breaking year only to shut down, and the drop-in centre executive who had to serve her clients lunch through a window because they were not allowed inside. The musician trapped in Peru when COVID-19 struck, and the nurse who returned home in tears after watching her patients die the loneliest of deaths.

The teacher who didn’t take COVID-19 seriously until he returned home terrified after listening to a podcast, and the man who still angrily wonders if his father would still be alive if vaccines had arrived in Niagara earlier. The woman who did everything right and became infected anyway, and the public health doctor whose pleas to save lives were ignored.

This is a story of a year of struggle and survival, of frustration and tears, of death and of hope.

This is our story.

Part one of three

The gathering storm

Physics teacher and football coach Mat Siscoe opened his daily journal on Wednesday, March 11, 2020, to put to ink a palpable sense of terror that struck him the night before.

“So, this COVID-19 stuff is legitimately worrying,” he wrote. “I don’t believe I will get sick and I don’t believe my family will get sick. I’m worried about my parents and in-laws but mostly I’m worried in a very general sense and I find it occupying all my thoughts.”

Less than 48 hours earlier, the novel coronavirus was something for other people in other places to worry about. Siscoe, who teaches in Niagara Falls and is a St. Patrick’s Ward councillor in St. Catharines, had chuckled with one of his council colleagues about it.

The first Canadian case of COVID-19 had been found on Jan. 25 in Toronto — a man who had travelled to Wuhan, China, where the virus first erupted. There were no cases in Niagara and federal officials said the risk to Canadians was low.

On the night of Tuesday, March 10, 2020, Siscoe did what he did most evenings — walked his dog while listening to the Joe Rogan podcast. That episode featured American epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, who laid out the global risk presented by the virus.

“When I got home, I was terrified. Legitimately terrified,” said Siscoe, who wrote in his journal entry the next morning, the same day the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic.

Two days later an 80-year-old resident of Ina Grafton Gage retirement home in St. Catharines was confirmed as the region’s first COVID-19 case. He died March 24, the first of at least 375 Niagara deaths.

The day of Niagara’s first confirmed case, March 13, Niagara-on-the-Lake musician Scott Robinson was nearly 6,000 kilometres away in Peru, where he had spent a blissful two weeks travelling. At 23, he’d left his job in St. Catharines, sold his car and set off for a year of adventure travelling the world, starting in Peru.

When he left on Feb. 29, there were few COVID-19 cases in Canada and the virus was not the focus of the national conversation. For the most part, the whole thing felt very far away.

“Somebody said, ‘Maybe be cautious about going to Asia, but other than that, there were really no concerns,” Robinson recalled.

He explored Peru and met fellow globetrotters while seeing beautiful country, staying in hostels and partying. It was all good. Until March 14.

Life at the hostel became agitated. European travellers were making emergency plans to go home. They’d heard Europe was closing its borders that night. American visitors were worried the U.S. would do the same. Robinson and a friend decided they too should return home and booked tickets for a March 18 flight out of Peru.

With a couple of days left in the country, the pair wanted to visit the ancient Inca ruins of Machu Picchu. On March 16, they rose before sunrise to catch a 5:30 a.m. bus in Aguas Calientes to take them up the mountain to the site.

While waiting to board, an official came out and said, “Machu Picchu closed, country closing, get home now.” If they weren’t on a plane out of the country by midnight, they would be subject to a military-enforced quarantine.

The train station was a mob scene. The airport, choked with hundreds of travellers from all corners of the globe trying to leave, was no better. It was a fight to get to the ticket counter.

That afternoon, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau urged Canadians abroad to come home. But it was too late for Robinson. He couldn’t get a same-day flight. He was stuck in Peru.

On the same day in Florida, Niagara’s Jane LaVacca was about to walk into a restaurant when a stranger approached.

“I’m surprised you’re still here,” said the man in the parking lot who noticed LaVacca’s Ontario licence plate.

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“Well, the virus.”

“What virus?” asked LaVacca who, at that point did not have a clue what he was referring to.

She and her husband went back to the car and Googled “Canada.”

“I see the prime minister is saying to everybody, please come back to Canada if you’re out of the country right now. I was like, what the heck? I’m freaking out,” said LaVacca, executive director of Westview Centre4Women in St. Catharines, a drop-in centre for low-income and homeless people.

She had just been through a bout of cancer, major surgery and chemotherapy. Her husband was taking her to Florida for a week’s respite. They drove down the day before, on the eve of March break.

Now, they turned around. As they drove to the border, LaVacca was on the phone with the centre’s program director, Grazia Sheppard. They had to figure out how to continue to serve their clients during the pandemic. More than 100 breakfasts and 100 to 150 lunches are served three times a week.

LaVacca said the women who use their program live paycheque to paycheque. If that cheque doesn’t come or they lose their job “they’re screwed.”

Shutting down was not an option.

“We never, ever had that conversation, her and I,” she said. “I called her and said, ‘We’ve got to be open,’ and she said, ‘You’re right.’ We were on the same page.”

The same day LaVacca was in the Florida parking lot, Niagara Falls resident Leah Carlone walked into a grocery store at 8:10 a.m. for a couple of heads of lettuce and couldn’t believe what she was seeing. It was Monday, but the aisles were jammed like a Saturday afternoon before a holiday.

“I said to the produce manager who I know rather well, I said, ‘What’s going on?’ And he said, ‘All weekend it’s been like this. We had people lined up outside the store this morning. And I said, ‘But it’s Monday.’ And he said, ‘Yes, but people are stocking up. I think this is going to blow up bigger than we thought,’ meaning the COVID issue.”

Across the province, staples including peanut butter and toilet paper were vanishing from store shelves.

Carlone was picking up a few things for her café, The Hub, on the main floor of a downtown St. Catharines office building on King Street which is frequented by regulars. She had been preparing for a 10 per cent decline in business over March break as office workers went on vacations, but that Monday business dropped 20 per cent.

The next day she started getting messages and emails from managers in offices upstairs saying they thought 25 per cent of their workers may be sent home because of COVID-19. By Wednesday, café sales were down to less than 50 per cent.

By Thursday the offices had cleared out completely and everyone was working from home. Carlone had to make the difficult decision to temporarily shut down and lay off eight full-time staff. With $15,000 worth of perishables, she asked employees, family and friends to take what they could, donating the rest.

“We’ll see you in three weeks,” she remembered posting on Facebook.

It turned into three and a half months.

The virus is out of the box

Not everyone was swept up in the gathering storm. On New Year’s Eve 2019, Dr. Karim Ali, Niagara Health’s top infectious disease expert, had a sense of déjà vu while reading an email alert about a cluster of infections in Wuhan.

“Suddenly, I am like ‘Oh, because in 2003 and 2004 when the first SARS pandemic happened, I was in med school back in Pakistan, and it reminded me of that,” Ali said. “You just pass that on to a few colleagues and it’s like, ‘Hey, look at this.’ And they are like, ‘Oh, this brings back memories.’”

About Jan. 18, 2020, with no declaration of a pandemic or the provincial government taking action, Niagara Health leaders including Ali met with the region’s acting medical officer of health, Dr. Mustafa Hirji, and his public health department to start pandemic planning.

The first shock came on Jan. 27, when a man with COVID-19-like symptoms arrived in the St. Catharines emergency room. It was a false alarm, but after that Ali starting taking swabs from anyone with symptoms at the hospital.

“It was only a matter of time before we would start seeing something,” he said.

At St. Catharines city hall, chief administrative officer Shelley Chemnitz was aware for months that a pandemic was possible after an annual hazard identification and risk assessment done for Ontario municipalities.

“Pandemic had been rising as of the last number of years and I know in the fall of 2019, looking at those numbers, we thought that’s coming up to a higher probability than we’ve seen in other years,” Chemnitz said. “Then in January you start to hear the news and you’re looking across the world and it’s like, OK.”

The city began to actively monitor the emerging crisis and prepare for the worst. Small details mattered. Instead of getting rid of some old computers as planned, they held onto them in case city employees had to work from home.

It turned out they would be needed. On March 12, the city activated its emergency operations centre — the day after the World Health Organization declared the pandemic — and started shutting down its facilities March 13.

Niagara officials drew up their plans to fight a pandemic with the hope they would not be needed.

For Hirji, that hope had died in mid-February.

Iran was grossly under-reporting cases. Italy was in lockdown. The virus was found in the United States.

“We saw there are cases in the U.S. that had gone undetected and realized, oh, it’s been here for several weeks now. And that was the point when I realized it’s out of the box, it’s spreading in the community,” Hirji said.

“There’s no way that we are going to stop it. It’s going to come here and it’s going to have a really big impact.”

What’s your last, best memory before the pandemic?

Sean Polden, owner Canalside Soda Co.

“We did a tap opening party at Lock Street Brewery. It was the first time that a restaurant served my products, and so there was a number of friends, family and supporters of the business that went that night to Lock Street Brewery.”

Shelley Chemnitz, City of St. Catharines chief administrative officer

“The weekend before things closed up we had an 85th birthday party for my mom. For me, it’s the personal memories, right, of the gatherings we haven’t been able to do this while.”

Scott Robinson, Niagara-on-the-Lake musician who got stuck in Peru

“I was making friends from all over the world and we were having cool experiences together, so I really had a taste of what that can be like. I’m grateful for that taste, but I wish it had been 50 more weeks instead of just the two.”

Mat Siscoe, teacher and St. Catharines city councillor

“The last social thing was a Robby Burns dinner in Toronto that a buddy of mine had organized … there was probably a hundred people at this event in the restaurant. We’re all crammed in and I was sitting at the bar having my haggis next to a couple of roommates. That was the last close, intimate, really wonderful time the group of us have had for a year.”

Dr. Mustafa Hirji, Niagara acting medical officer of health

“The last normal-ish thing I did before the pandemic was my brother was actually visiting and I went out to dinner with him. This was, I think, on March 13. So the day we announced our first case, before dropping him off at the airport.”

Key Dates