Full Transcript
Pete:
The coronavirus – creeping onto the world’s scene only a few short months ago and then exploding into our day-to-day lives. Every day we hear about the impact of corona and COVID-19 on – well, almost everyone. But how is it affecting disabled individuals? Today on Blind Abilities we explore just how blind and visually impaired individuals have experienced and adapted to corona and COVID-19. We have circumnavigated the world, from Australia to Malaysia-
Elise Lonsdale:
My name is Elise Lonsdale, and I’m from northern Australia.
Chee Chau:
This is Chee Chau, from Malaysia.
Pete:
-England-
Steve Wicketts:
Hi, my name’s Steve,
Jo Fishwick:
-Jo Fishwick-
Pete:
-Trinidad and Tobago-
Marlon Parieaho:
-Marlon Parieaho-
Pete:
-and Canada-
Nick D’Ambrosio:
-Nick D’Ambrosio-
Tim McIsaac
-Tim McIsaac-
Pete:
-the United States-
Lori Thompson:
-Lori Thompson-
Brooklyn Rodden Kelly:
-Brooklyn-
Brian Fischler:
-Brian Fischler-
Sherry Molengraft:
-Sherry Molengraft-
Jeff Bazer:
-Jeff Bazer-
Pete:
-and our travels continue, in this, the 13th episode in our series Around the World with COVID-19 From a Blindness Perspective, we meet Tim McIsaac. Tim hails from the city of Winnipeg in the province of Manitoba, in Canada. He brings a different perspective, from a relatively small city in a relatively sparsely populated province. Tim shares his experience as an employee of the province government, his coping with travelling outside as the city and the province slowly opened up their restrictions, and shares his thoughtful views on social distancing and other precautionary measures aimed at reducing and eliminating COVID-19. And now, let’s meet Tim McIsaac.
Canadian man 1:
An additional probable case of COVID-19 has been identified. This case is related to travel. This means our total confirmed positive and probable positive cases amount to about- remains at 20 at this time. Today I’m strongly advising all Manitobans to cancel or postpone any nonessential travel outside of Manitoba.
Canadian Newscaster (female) 1:
A passenger on a WestJet flight originating in Vancouver that landed at Winnipeg’s airport was taken to hospital with a possible case of COVID-19.
Canadian Newscaster (male) 1:
A middle-aged woman exhibited symptoms that have led to primary screening for the virus.
Canadian Man 1:
Today I have the sad duty of announcing Manitoba’s first death related to COVID-19.
[transition noise]
Today we are announcing three new cases, bringing our total cases to 39.
[transition noise]
Today we are announcing 13 new cases of COVID-19, bringing our total to 217 cases. We are also reporting a third death today.
Tim McIsaac:
Hello, my name is Tim McIsaac, I live in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which for those of you who don’t know is about 60 miles north of the Canada-US border, with North Dakota. My COVID-19 experience I guess really began on March 18th—I work full-time for the Manitoba government-
Canadian man 2:
Now we have more than 1800 employees who are working from home. Most service desks are closed, the suspension of all permits for special events and festivals until June-
Tim:
-I went into work, and by 10:00 I was going home. I brought home with me my laptop and my Braille display, so I’m pretty well set up here. The biggest challenge with that is the accessibility to our VPN—it’s mouse-dependent, and I have to use the mouse pad, and I can’t have TeamViewer on my computer, so I have been using Aira. They must direct me to where the token is I have to tap on, and then I can start the process that way. We do some conference calls—they do use GoToMeeting, which I find horribly inaccessible. I prefer Zoom, which we were allowed to use for a while and then we had to stop because our IT department had some security issues with it. I hear they’re going to get into Microsoft Teams, maybe, which is a bit better. One thing I did notice about working from home that was a challenge is the inability of the tech support people when I’ve had problems to come onto my computer, even though we have software for that it seems to not work very well with the VPN, and I had an issue yesterday and without going into a lot of detail it would have been a lot easier if I’d have been in my office, and been able to just have them come on and fix it for me, rather than them trying to have to explain things. The biggest challenge I seem to have with many of our support people is I have to continually remind them that I can’t see and use a screen reader, and even then they don’t really understand all the implications of that. What probably could have been done by a technician to fix my email for me in five minutes in the office took the better part of an hour yesterday, just trying to talk through it back and forth. There were a couple places where verbal communication was a little bit difficult, and that definitely slowed down and frustrated the process a little bit.
Canadian man 1:
Today I’m issuing updated orders under the Public Health Act. Effective at 12:01 a.m. Monday March 30th, we’ll be limiting public gatherings of no more than 10 people at any indoor or outdoor place or premises. This includes places of worship, gatherings or family events such as weddings and funerals. Retail businesses including grocery and food stores, shopping centers, pharmacies, and gas stations must ensure separation of one to two meters between patrons assembling in their business.
[transition noise]
April 1st, all restaurants and commercial facilities that serve food are prohibited from serving food to customers in their premises. Grocery stores will remain open, but they must also maintain appropriate social distancing between their customers. Bars will be closed. Personal service businesses such as hair salons and massage therapy offices will be closed.
Tim:
In terms of challenges for me as a blind person, I would say that managing social distancing when I’m out in public on my own is somewhat of a challenge. My dog is not of course trained to do that, and it’s really hard to get dogs to know how to do that, and it’s a challenge because of course all of the queues that are being used to help people maintain physical distancing are visual. It’s a bit anxiety-provoking for me, because of- not anything I know of that’s happened here, but stories I’ve read on Facebook about people being, you know, challenged I guess about their, what? Sincerity, commitment to physical distancing as blind people when really it’s not a question of do we believe in it or not, it’s a question of the difficulties we have trying to practice it considering how visual the methods of maintaining it are.
Going out I have a guide dog. I’ve been out once by myself, I went to a bar, met a friend, I came on the patio without going through the front door, so they weren’t able to question me about was I in self-isolating, or did I need to be doing that, all that stuff. But they were very tactful, they just brought me some hand sanitizer, I put it on, and that was that. I had to go to the bank—my niece took me there, and she helped with making sure we stayed in our lane, our little place on the sidewalk lined up outside, waiting to be told we could go in. I think it certainly would have been a challenge for me to have done that on my own. In the last couple of days I’ve started to wear a mask when I’m out. I didn’t realize how much you go with audio cues, like the echo of your footsteps, and to my surprise the sound of my own breathing, and what that echo kind of does in terms of helping me keep oriented. Now that’s gone, because the mask is blocking that sound. It’s almost like there’s a piece missing, I mean, I think my brain is starting to adjust to it, but it still is a little bit weird for me.
I have had some experiences with hospitals, because my wife was hospitalized for something totally COVID unrelated, obviously, or I wouldn’t be going to visit her, but I can go to visit her, and I’m the only person who can. So transportation is a bit of a challenge, I don’t always have a driver so I’m having to take taxis, which is working fine. I could use paratransit, but that requires perhaps a little more organization and provides for a little less flexibility than getting a ride with someone or taking a taxi does, so I haven’t tended to do that. I haven’t used the paratransit system, actually, since I started working from home four months ago.
Canadian Newscaster (female) 2:
For the first time in over four months, a Winnipeg church has opened its doors for Sunday service. Loosened restrictions for churches, mosques, pow-wows, and other spiritual events fall under phase four of Manitoba’s reopening plan, which kicked in this weekend.
Canadian Man 3:
Church is a community, and a community is not watching something on television.
Tim:
COVID here has been relatively mild, I think, compared to how it’s gone down in other parts of the world. We’ve had just 300 cases here confirmed, a couple of spikes—one in early March, and one just recently this past week. We’ve had seven people die, one who’s in intensive care in the hospital and that’s the only person who’s hospitalized at the moment. We’ve been gradually opening up here, starting phase four, they’re finally going to allow movie theaters to open up, they’re finally going to allow live performances to open up, albeit with limited capacities. The casinos are opening again, that’ll make a lot of people happy. They have pushed back, though, on allowing people coming from certain parts of Canada to not have to self-isolate—if you’re coming from western Canada, you don’t have to self-isolate anymore, but if you’re coming from southern Ontario or Quebec or Atlantic Canada you still do. They were going to lift that, and then they got public pushback so they said that they would leave that in place. We’ve done fairly well—I know there’s places that have lots of cases, and I suspect that at some point we’re going to take a bigger hit than we already have in this pandemic. So far we’ve done well, but nevertheless you know people are still anxious because there’s always the case of whatever scenario you like, you know, the dam bursting, the other shoe dropping, whatever cliche you want to use. I think there’s some anticipation that in fall and winter particularly when flu season comes that there will be a spike and we will probably experience more of what has gone on in other places, but at the same time we can hopefully keep that to a minimum. I mean, we are a population of only just over a million people, the whole province, and 70% of that lives in Winnipeg. We do have, perhaps, a little bit of an easier time than maybe other areas do trying to control this.
I hope that gives you some idea of what it’s like for me, Tim McIsaac, to be living with COVID-19 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. I hope everybody stays safe and well, and I’m particularly thinking and praying for those of you who are listening who are in some of the places that we now are I guess identifying as hotspots like Texas and California and Florida. Take care, everybody.
Canadian man 1:
The current five day test positivity rate is 0.83%, the total number of lab-confirmed positives in Manitoba is now 354, and the number of deaths due to COVID-19 remains at seven.
Canadian man 4:
Early and decisive actions by the Manitoba government, but more importantly the hard work of Manitobans and their dedication have made a difference. On April 29th, our government unveiled
Restoring Safe Services Together, Manitoba’s pandemic economic recovery road map, so we can move forward with confidence, and carefully restart our economy and reopen our communities. We kept the COVID curve flat, we continue to have some of the lowest test positivity numbers in Canada and in North America. Based on your feedback, we hope to be in a position to move forward with restrictions easing somewhat as of this Saturday, July 25th.
Pete:
It’s been great hearing from Tim McIsaac about his experiences with the coronavirus and COVID-19 from Winnipeg, in the province of Manitoba in Canada. We hope you’re enjoying our series Around the World with COVID-19 From a Blindness Perspective. Be sure to stay tuned for more episodes in this series. And from all of us here at Blind Abilities, through these challenging times, to you, your family, and friends, stay well, stay informed, and stay strong. Thank you so much for listening, and have a great day.
[Music] [Transition noise] -When we share
-What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities.
Jeff:
For more podcasts with the blindness perspective, check us out on the web at www.blindabilities.com, on Twitter @BlindAbilities. Download our app from the app store Blind Abilities, that’s two words, or send us an email at info@blindabilities.com. Thanks for listening.
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