At 5AM, last Sunday, I was woken by the telephone.

“Hello?”

It was the night-duty nurse at my parents’ retirement home. “We’ve called an ambulance for your mother. She’s incoherent from dehydration and having trouble breathing.”

My parents, who had been in quarantine for the previous week, had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 with those wonky PCR tests.

Fifteen minutes later, I was bicycling into the dark parking lot of the retirement home. The ambulance, with its swirling lights, was already parked before the front door. A minute later, my mother was wheeled out on a stretcher.

“Hi, John!” She was talkative enough, as the paramedics — with the biggest gas masks I’ve seen yet — rolled her down the ramp and into the ambulance.

Two hours later, I was on the phone with the ER doc. X-rays showed Mom had pneumonia. The doctor admitted it may just be a bacterial infection. She prescribed antibiotics, steroids, doubled her oxygen tank (she has COPD) and discharged her. Mom was glad to be going home so quickly to my 92-year-old father (who had no respiratory symptoms, just a sore throat).

So much for the killer virus. Looks more like a case of killer lockdown.

That the doctor pointed out the possibility of bacterial pneumonia was no big surprise. The nursing home forces residents to wear masks that are only washed once per week. This reminded me of the article I wrote back on October 6, Medical Doctor Warns that “Bacterial Pneumonias Are on the Rise” from Mask Wearing, for the Centre for Research on Globalization. Since it was published, it has remained on their list of top 20 most popular articles, currently holding at #1.

I had reported this issue, among many others, to the ER doctor. Yesterday, the Armed Forces moved in and are investigating why there are so many infections. I haven’t been able to enter the building since March, so I only hope they don’t find anything as negligent as they uncovered back in April in other Ontario nursing homes. For my parents’ sake I’m glad for the intervention; but am concerned such actions make martial law look like the solution for a government-created problem.

For example, before lockdown I would help my father with 30-minutes of stair climbing twice a week. After lockdown he was in a wheelchair. Now with this don’t-leave-your-cell “outbreak” my Mom goes from being active to being rushed into hospital. (I’ve been trying to get my parents out of there for years; but they’ve refused to leave.)

Both my parents seem to be recovering. They were even mentioned in the local newspaper as the “married couple who opted to continue sharing a room.” Another front page article cited an advocacy group saying they’ve known for a long time there were problems at that retirement home. The Ministry of Health’s COVID-19 restrictions simply made it more unhealthy. Why can’t people see this isn’t about the spread of a coronavirus? Rather it’s about unhealthy environments, diets and lifestyles that naturally lead to respiratory distress.