Windsorites look back at two years of COVID-19 pandemic

For two years, the world has been in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic.

And while a lot of time has passed, it still feels very fresh for Windsor resident June Muir.

"It was really, really scary," she said Sunday, thinking back to her diagnosis in March of 2020.

Muir was on a trip to New York from March 8-10, 2020, when she contracted COVID-19.

She and her partner Bill Mitchell were among first people locally to contract the virus.

What followed were lingering symptoms, such as breathing difficulties, coughing, fever, and heart palpitations, diagnosed by her doctor as long-COVID.

"When I got the call that I tested positive, I actually sat there and I cried because I said to her what should I expect? What’s going to happen? And nobody seemed to have the answers," she recalled.

Muir and Mitchell are just two of more than 38,000 people in Windsor-Essex who have tested positive with the virus.

585 people have died with COVID since onset of pandemic.

"We have all lived through the same events of the last few years but we’ll have very different experiences," said Windsor-Essex County Health Unit CEO Nicole Dupuis during their weekly briefing Thursday.

Over those two years, hospitals have been at capacity and overrun with ICU cases and hospitalizations numerous times, leading at one point to the opening of a field hospital and discussions about a temporary morgue.

"We’re preparing to be at a critical level," chief operating officer Karen RIddell of Windsor Regional Hospital told CTV News in January, 2021. "We’re trying to avoid getting to chaos."

Healthcare professionals have been tested daily, regularly working through vacations and spending a great deal of time away from families.

"I don’t think anyone truly understands what’s going on until you are in our shoes," one nurse told CTV during a tour of the beleaguered intensive care unit last January.

At the same time, businesses have been battered by lockdown after lockdown, some closing their doors for good while others extended massive debt to stay afloat.

Students and their parents have flip-flopped between in-school and at-home learning multiple times.

Jobs have been permanently lost.

People have been isolated.

"It’s not normal for us to not be with one another and not spend time together and miss holidays together. It’s been very difficult," says Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens, who says our lives have been changed forever.

"No one in their wildest dreams would have predicted this would have predicted that this would have gone on for two years now and we would have gone through the collective trauma that we’ve gone through," he said.

When vaccines came along at the tail end of 2020, many saw them as a saving grace, with Canadians among the most vaccinated citizens in the world.

But they’ve also become a divisive flashpoint, with many who chose against getting vaccinated left dealing with vaccine passports and mandates, restrictions and the loss of their jobs.

But two years under the belt, Mayor Dilkens hopes the pandemic is nearing an end.

"It feels like we’re in a better place,” he said. “You see the world opening up a little bit more, so we’re moving to that phase in the pandemic and really it becomes endemic."

March 2022 ushered in the next stage of loosened restrictions, which for many will mean the removal of masks in public settings, seeing more of one another and getting back to life.

"We ask everyone in our community to practice kindness overall and understanding, and that their outlook and approach may be different from your own," says Dupuis.

For Muir and Mitchell, it signals renewed hope that there is life with and after COVID.

"I do see light at the end of the tunnel," said Muir.

"And things are opening up, businesses are opening up and I think things are looking a lot brighter."