‘Are we going to be OK?’ How the world as we knew it came to an end one week last March

A feast of Korean chicken, a comedy bar, soccer at BMO Field, Diane Arbus photos at the AGO, a dance party at Sneaky Dee’s.

These are some of the last normal things Toronto Star readers remember doing before COVID-19 silenced the rhythm of daily life.

“Imagine dancing at an enclosed space with tons of other people without a single worry,” said Maggie Castro, one of the hundreds of people who responded to the Star’s Twitter request for stories.

“Miss those days.”

Registered midwife Remi Ejiwunmi oversaw a lovely, uncomplicated birth at Mississauga Hospital.

“In retrospect, it was probably one of the last times I got to see my client’s face and they got to see my face during a birth,” said Ejiwunmi.

“I used to hug my clients at the end of a birth or when they left my care, but I think that was the last time it happened.”

March 7-13 was the week everything changed in Toronto.

When it began, more than 2,000 people crowded a convention held in Mississauga on Saturday, to elect a new leader for the Ontario Liberal Party. Canadians were mourning the death of hockey legend Henri Richard. Contract disputes were threatening to interrupt schools and city services. Families were looking forward to March break.

Threading through all of it was a novel coronavirus that had circled the globe silently and for the most part, undetected, until entire countries were in lockdown. Italians singing together from their balconies to maintain morale as the number of dead, ill and dying overwhelmed hospitals and crematoriums.

There were no face masks in evidence at the provincial Liberal leadership convention. Reporters worked cheek-to-jowl in scrums. Toronto city Coun. Josh Matlow greeted people with hugs. Others self-consciously bumped elbows instead of shaking hands.

By the end of that week, COVID-19 had been declared a pandemic, Ontario schools had been ordered closed, licensed child-care centres were closed and March break camps were cancelled.

We stopped shaking hands.

Henri Richard would be buried with only family in attendance. Contract disputes with teachers and city staff would be settled and quickly forgotten. March break would be the last time most people travelled outside the province.

Even scientific and medical experts who have watched the virus since it was first reported in December 2019 as a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China, point to the second week of March as significant in Toronto.

“That’s when it really hit me,” said Dr. Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s medical officer of health.

She had first read about the virus on Dec. 31, and had been monitoring the situation ever since, reaching out to Toronto Fire Chief Matthew Pegg, who was appointed to be the city’s full-time COVID-19 incident commander on March 12, 2020, and now leads the city’s immunization task force.

Pegg remembers recognizing the importance of the outbreak in Wuhan from the moment de Villa contacted him. While their paths sometimes cross, the two are not typically involved in close collaboration.

“I hadn’t had a lot of interaction with Dr. de Villa,” said Pegg, who took over emergency operations full time on Thursday. “Now there isn’t another human being that I talk to more every day.”

By the middle of that week in March, de Villa knew the time had come to take unprecedented action.

“We were watching very carefully what was happening in New York,” she said. “It ramped up so, so quickly in New York.”

She consulted with peers, scientists and epidemiologists. Scientific modelling had begun predicting dire consequences if widespread actions were not undertaken — and quickly.

Ordinary days and small freedoms were about to be remembered with unusual fondness.

Monday, March 9

North American stock markets have their worst day since the Great Recession, with the TSX composite dropping as much as 10 per cent. Pearl Jam announces it is calling off its world tour, including a kick-off show in Toronto.

On Monday morning, Coun. Josh Matlow was settling into a committee meeting at city hall when he received an urgent text from his office. Around him, people were shuffling papers and finding their seats.

It was an utterly unremarkable moment in every way, except that his administrative assistant was now insisting he leave the meeting immediately. Matlow was perplexed.

“All the big dramatic events hadn’t unfolded. Kids were still going to school, everyone was going to work,” said Matlow. “We were at the fist-bumping stage, but people were still going out to dinner.”

Outside the meeting he was told that his office had received a call from a synagogue he’d visited the previous week. One of the men he’d met there, who had recently returned from a trip to Washington, D.C., had tested positive for COVID-19.

Matlow remembers that nobody really knew exactly what that meant, or what needed to be done as a consequence. It was still early days.

Matlow called de Villa. After gathering details of his interaction, she told him to go directly home and begin self-isolation, including from his wife and daughter, immediately. He was not to talk to anyone in the halls or stop along the way.

Matlow moved into the basement of his home. His wife left his meals at the top of the stairs.

He watched his daughter walk to the bus stop for school. Each day the number of kids dwindled.

And then it stopped.

“It was a unique and surreal experience, watching the world shut down when your world had already shut down,” said Matlow.

“And it was clear to me that while I might have been the first person people knew of, it was obvious to me that I wasn’t going to be the last. Things were about to change, in a big way.”

He did not develop symptoms and as far as he knows, has never had COVID-19. He knows of no one who acquired it through him.

Matlow was the first known public official in Toronto to go into quarantine. Mayor John Tory was soon to become the second.

Tuesday, March 10

The U.S. death toll due to coronavirus hits 28, as infections spread to all but a handful of states.

Mayor John Tory led a scheduled business mission to London on Tuesday, to encourage investment and job growth in Toronto. On the day he flew back from the U.K., Wednesday, the World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

He consulted with de Villa about the trip, but he recalls that at the time, no travel restrictions had been imposed in Canada that would affect his plans.

The epidemic was further advanced in London than it was in Toronto.

“I think the first time I realized how serious it was going to become was actually when I was in England, because they were quite ahead of us in terms of (number) of cases,” said Tory.

He arrived home on Wednesday evening, and went to work as usual on Thursday and Friday.

By the end of the week, de Villa would recommend that Tory enter isolation, not just for the health of the people around him, but to set an example.

“The virus doesn’t care if you’re the mayor or a regular citizen,” de Villa said.

At the time, working from home wasn’t widely done or encouraged. Tory had to teach himself how to govern a city of three million people from his dining room table.

“I went for nine of those 14 days, for sure, without seeing another human being, except on Zoom. I’m sure in my entire life I’ve never gone nine days without seeing another human being,” said Tory. “I mean, why would you? You just don’t do that.”

He was still in isolation when he signed the official order declaring a state of emergency for Toronto, effective March 24, allowing him to act without council approval to take whatever actions he deemed necessary to safeguard the city.

It was the first time such an order had been made in the history of Toronto.

He signed it wearing gloves.

Wednesday, March 11

Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announce they have tested positive for the coronavirus. U.S. President Donald Trump sharply restricts travel from 26 European nations. Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein is sentenced to 23 years in prison. The World Health Organization declares the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic.

Ontario Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner remembers the all-party meeting that Wednesday, when opposition leaders joined Premier Doug Ford, Health Minister Christine Elliot and Dr. David Williams, the province’s chief medical officer of health, at the cabinet table for a briefing on the virus.

Schreiner bumped into Education Minister Stephen Lecce on the way to the meeting.

“His eyes said it all as he told me: This is serious, the numbers are frightening,” said Schreiner.

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By Wednesday, Cece Scriver, owner of the vintage store Courage My Love in the heart of Kensington Market, noticed an unusually small number of people in the otherwise-popular store. Those who did enter were sporting gloves taped to their wrists.

Store owners in the area were frantically asking each other whether they should close. Scriver remembers messaging her neighbours for advice. “How long can we wait before we’re forced to close?” she asked.

The taped-on gloves, in those days before protective equipment was being widely manufactured, weren’t the only thing she noticed. People were coming into the store with dishwashing gloves and scarves around their faces.

Kensington Market merchants had mixed opinions on whether to remain open or close, Scriver recalled. Some wanted to make money, others wanted to take maximum precautions.

By Thursday, a few of the stores on her street had shuttered.

The Ontario government would not close non-essential workplaces until March 24. But Scriver closed her store on March 16 — the day de Villa asked local businesses to help their staff stay home; the day she asked bars and restaurants to stop in-person service and move to take out; the day she recommended all nightclubs, movie theatres and concert venues close as soon as possible.

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For many people, the seriousness of the pandemic was made real when the NBA postponed the season on Wednesday evening — right before a game between Utah Jazz and Oklahoma City Thunder, after Utah player Rudy Gobert tested positive for the virus.

Two nights earlier, MLB, MLS, NBA and the NHL had issued a joint statement saying all team locker rooms and clubhouses were to be closed to everyone except players and essential employees.

But the cancellation of the season hit those around the Toronto Raptors hard. Especially because the team had just played Gobert and the Jazz two nights earlier.

“Obviously, it hit really close to home because it was really a member of the NBA family,” said Raptors coach Nick Nurse.

“I shifted into the mode of ‘Let’s do what we’re supposed to do.’ You know, ‘Let’s get home and stay home,’ and try to start spreading that message of, ‘Let’s make sure we do what we’re told here and try to stay healthy.’”

Raptor Norman Powell hosts an annual charity bowling event, and in 2020 it was scheduled for Wednesday in Toronto.

“Usually, we have the sponsors that pay for the bowling lanes and two or three guys are assigned to each lane to interact, take pictures, sign autographs and bowl with them,” said Powell.

“They changed it to where there was literally no interaction with the fans. They had to stay six feet behind us … it was literally the fans watching us bowl instead of us bowling with them, which was kind of weird and kind of sucked, because I know they paid good money to interact…with us.”

Powell remembers feeling like COVID would not cripple the NBA — precautions were being taken. Everything would be fine.

“Nobody knew what the virus was really about,” said Powell. “It was like this is a little flu the way people were talking about it.”

Some initial reports suggested the symptoms would be minor and disappear after a few days, he added.

“That’s all I was focused on: I’m not shaking anyone’s hand, going to have hand sanitizer on me. I’m cleaning, just going on about my day like that.

“To see where we’re at now with masks and gloves, it’s crazy.”

Thursday, March 12

World markets drop sharply again. The prime minister’s office announces that his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, has tested positive.

Premier Doug Ford had flown into Ottawa the previous evening to attend a first ministers’ meeting, set earlier in the year by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, for provincial premiers and national Indigenous leaders, that began early Thursday.

“That morning started off normal,” remembers Ford. “I had a radio interview and then my staff briefed me over breakfast ahead of the press conference with my ministers.

“During it, I remember thinking, ‘I just want to keep people calm. I don’t want them to panic.’

“After that, everything changed. The first ministers’ meeting was cancelled and I was getting on a plane back to Toronto. Within a few hours we got our cabinet together — with some ministers in Ottawa, others at Queen’s Park or in their ridings — to make the tough decision to be the first province in the country to close schools.

“What still amazes me to this day, is how in those weeks and months following the state of emergency, Ontarians pulled together like never before and showed their true Ontario spirit.”

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Education Minister Stephen Lecce made the unprecedented announcement on Thursday that schools would close for two weeks following March break to contain the spread of COVID-19.

He said the decision was made even as the government was conducting round-the-clock negotiations with the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association (OECTA), representing 45,000 teachers.

“We’re in the midst of bargaining — during what had been almost a year of bargaining at that point — and the day we made the announcement to close schools, we were at the table and very close to a deal with OECTA,” said Lecce.

“At the same time, I was being pulled into briefings on an urgent matter related to COVID-19 and its spread in the province of Ontario and the potential decision to close schools.

“So at the same time as we’re concluding one deal, I’m literally now on the phone with the chief medical officer of health and (Health) Minister Elliott to discuss a potential school closures decision.”

The OECTA deal was sealed within the same hour that the decision was made to close schools, on the advice of the chief medical officer of health. Both the deal and the school closures were announced that same day.

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Within seconds, teachers were forced to react.

Lisa Klimkowski, a Grade 8 teacher with the Halton District School Board and a local Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario representative, was in a monthly union meeting when Lecce announced the school closures.

“Phones started blowing up with the news, which stopped the meeting right in its tracks. In that room were people with countless years of collective teaching experience, and none of us had ever experienced anything like this before.

“The realization dawned that the next day we would be dismissing our children for what could be a very long time. It was incredibly profound,” said Klimkowski.

“When you’re an educator, your whole life is defined, and always has been defined, by the predictability of the school year. For the first time since I started kindergarten, that safety and predictability would no longer there. Most importantly, it wouldn’t be there for our students,” added Klimkowski.

“Our job is to support students: what would that look like in this new world we were being thrown into?”

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Lesley Dalgarno, a Grade 2 teacher at the Halton District School Board, remembers driving her husband and son to the airport on Thursday. They were headed to the Junos in Saskatoon.

Her husband Brad, a former NHL player with the New York Islanders, now runs a marketing company and plays in the annual Juno Cup — a game between former NHL players and musicians that raises money for schools to buy musical instruments.

“We had not even gotten out of Oakville. We were coming around that curve right near the Ford plant on the QEW. My husband said: I think something is buzzing in my jacket.”

It was Jim Cuddy calling. The singer-songwriter for Blue Rodeo and Brad Dalgarno are friends. Cuddy told Dalgarno the Junos had been cancelled.

“He thought he was teasing him,” said Lesley. “We turned around, in silence.

“That was the holy crap moment.”

She remembers sending her Grade 2 class off on the last day of school before that March break, not sure whether the extra two weeks off might turn into something longer.

“You just kind of had that sinking feeling — what if it’s longer, what should they be taking home? Should they be taking home extra reading, should they be taking home their shoes and clothes? I was just like: ‘Take it all, take it all!’”

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COVID-19 felt far away when the Blue Jays flew to Florida for spring training a few weeks earlier, but by this point the situation was deteriorating rapidly.

Florida had declared a statement of emergency on Monday, the same day MLB limited locker room access. On Wednesday, at TD Ballpark in Dunedin, a podium and rope were installed to keep reporters six feet away from players during interviews.

Shortstop Bo Bichette is rarely willing to miss a game. A day earlier, he was giving autographs and posing for pictures with fans.

But by Thursday, he would have sat out the hourlong trip to Bradenton, Fla., to take on the Pirates.

“I’m not going to sit here and lie and say that anybody wanted to be at that game after seeing the NBA canceled,” Bichette said.

Fans were still welcome in the stands, but instead of scoring autographs and photos as players came off the field, they got waves and nods of acknowledgement instead.

In the locker room in Bradenton after batting practice, infielder Cavan Biggio learned of more sports cancellations. The NCAA had shut down the March Madness basketball tournaments.

“I was just a little bit confused as to why we were playing that one spring training game when every other sport was down,” said Biggio.

Around the fifth inning of the Bradenton game, shortly after 3 p.m., MLB announced it was cancelling all spring training games, and delaying the regular season by at least two weeks.

The news reached Biggio and Bichette in the dugout. Toronto continued playing until about 4:15 p.m.

“They made us finish the game,” said Bichette. “I remember we were all kind of complaining about that.”

By Friday, the Dunedin park was closed to anyone outside the Jays organization. With a border closure looming, reporters were scrambling to book flights back to Toronto.

The regular season wouldn’t start until July 24.

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Thursday morning, an email went out to the company at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Just the day before, the musicians had been hard at work at Roy Thomson Hall, rehearsing Tchaikovsky’s “Piano Concerto No. 1” with pianist Sergei Babayan and Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at Exhibition.”

The first three nights of the repertoire were scheduled for the coming weekend and the musicians were looking forward to performing.

“We were expecting a couple thousand people in the house,” said Matthew Loden, CEO of TSO.

But on Thursday, the company was informed that the concerts would be cancelled, after the province announced that gatherings of more than 1,000 should be avoided.

Conductor Jader Bignamini, who had just flown to Toronto from Milan was immediately asked to quarantine. Coming from a hot spot, he understood the necessity of it.

Music director Gustavo Gimeno, who was to begin his inaugural season at the orchestra in September 2020, was at home in Amsterdam. From there, he helped re-plan the season, until the decision was made in July to cancel it entirely.

The pandemic rode in hard on the heels of a year of record-breaking fundraising and successful subscription sales for the TSO.

“All of the metrics were wonderfully positive and then we had to start cancelling concerts and the world changed,” Loden said.

Friday, March 13

Dr. de Villa announces that Toronto’s March break camps will not open, and all city-run daycares, libraries, and community and recreation centres will be closed until at least April 5. De Villa suggests that all residents who travel outside of the country should quarantine for 14 days upon their return. Mayor John Tory goes into isolation. Dr. David Williams warns Ontario residents against leaving the country unless necessary and suggests the cancellation of all events with more than 250 people. He also calls on colleges and universities to move courses online. The federal government calls on all residents to stay within the country’s borders. The stock markets recover some of their historic losses.

On Friday, company managers gathered the cast of the smash-hit musical “Hamilton” into the green room of the Ed Mirvish Theatre and delivered the news that the show would be closing that day.

Joseph Morales had been playing the lead role of Alexander Hamilton for four years. His contract was up in two weeks. He knew that unless the pandemic was resolved inside that time, the show he was about to perform would be his final one. He decided to fully occupy the moment.

“I was really intentional about watching everyone be brilliant onstage, taking everything in and trying to stay super present and grateful,” Morales said.

The set and costumes for the musical remain in the theatre, waiting to be taken up again.

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Just after lunch, James Hunter, head of wealth management at Echelon Wealth Partners, left his office to attend a company-wide meeting that had been called in the boardroom.

“Here’s what’s happening,” one of the managers whispered to him as they walked. “We’re sending everyone home.”

Hunter had watched with concern as the Dow Jones plummeted 1,300 points on Monday, and then went into freefall three days later after then-U.S. president Donald Trump announced a travel ban to and from Europe.

Clients were calling in, worried about their investments.

Still, Hunter didn’t think there would be widespread lockdowns. The virus at the time seemed largely confined to countries such as Italy and China. He’d booked a ski trip to Utah for March break. Some of his colleagues were skeptical about his plans. “You don’t really think you’re going on this trip, do you?” they asked.

“Of course I am,” he replied. The virus wouldn’t spread to Utah.

Now, a day after one of the largest stock market crashes in decades, the company was advising employees they would work from home for the foreseeable future.

“I remember distinctly looking at the group and saying, ‘See ya in two weeks,’” Hunter recalls.

“That line makes me cringe now. We had such little grasp of the situation.”

He is still working from home.

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In the Village, Michael Erickson had noticed an unsettling trend among his customers at Glad Day Bookshop. Customers were telling him about how they’d been laid off from their jobs as nannies and cleaners, servers and concierges.

“A lot of LGBTQ+ people in our community come to Glad Day when they don’t know where else to go. And that week we were seeing a wave of people, one person after another, telling us they’d been laid off. That was really scary and concerning to us,” he said.

The shop had tonnes of events lined up that week — book readings, drag performances, late-night parties. A Drag Brunch, scheduled for Friday morning, had filled its reservations online in the days prior.

Almost nobody showed up.

Erickson remembers standing in the nearly empty room, just him and the servers and a few brave attendees.

“We all looked at each other, and it was like, ‘Are we going to be OK?’”

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Dr. Norman Chu, chief and medical director of the emergency department at Scarborough Health Network, had plans to head to Florida before March break.

“(When COVID arrived), it was really crazy. Really crazy. Because, you know, I’ve been through SARS — I thought that was going to be it. For the rest of my life, my career, nothing would come close to SARS. But this is so much more than SARS,” he said.

On the Friday, his family finally decided against the Florida trip.

“We decided to do a local trip to Quebec. As we’re driving up, things were happening so quickly that I actually couldn’t drive. I had to get my wife to drive, because I was on the phone with multiple meetings, planning for worst-case scenarios.

“We had gotten to Quebec and I didn’t even do any skiing. I was on the phone, all the time.

“We had set up our COVID assessment centre…You know, who’s going to staff it, what would the flow look like, how would people line up, security, how many swabbing stations we need. All the little details that really need to come together. Which in normal times, would take months to set up.

“I just remember that we set it up in six days. I remember that really well, because it was just incredible.

“It literally felt like there was a burning platform.”

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At Pearson Airport, members of the union representing 50,000 customs officers, flight attendants, security staff, duty-free clerks and other workers met at Terminal 3 on Friday, as they braced for the impact of the pandemic.

Sean Smith, a representative of the Toronto Airport Workers Council and mobilizing coordinator for Unifor Local 2002, said that as he looked around the room he began to understand operations at the airport were about to fundamentally change.

“The airport was no longer where you go to (start) a beach vacation,” he said.

Instead, it was about to become a destination for a global evacuation effort as thousands of Canadians travelling abroad hurried home.

Sitting in the meeting, Smith remembered watching news footage of the fall of Saigon when he was a kid in 1975, and seeing desperate people scramble onto helicopters to safety. He envisioned Pearson becoming the end point for scenes like that around the world.

“It was just airlift upon airlift of stranded Canadians coming home,” Smith said of the days that followed. “We flipped into crisis management mode after that point.”

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By the end of the week, everything had changed in Brandy McKinnon’s bus.

In the spring of 2020, the five-year TTC operator was assigned to the 97 Yonge, which runs through the heart of Toronto, from York Mills station in the north to Queens Quay on Lake Ontario.

It travels through downtown, where before COVID, 500,000 people made their way to and from their jobs in office towers, stores and restaurants each day. By the time McKinnon got to Davisville, halfway through the route, the bus was usually standing room only.

Regular commuters rode so often they knew each other by name.

Around the week of March 6, McKinnon started hearing unusual chatter between them.

Some had stopped riding and those still taking the bus were asking why.

“They were like, ‘I wonder if so-and-so is coming on the bus today? They’re not at their stop. I wonder if they’ll be out here tomorrow,’” she said.

By Friday, some of the customers who had noticed their fellow riders were missing stopped showing up themselves.

“Every morning my bus was full standing load. Then within three, four days, literally it was maybe a dozen people. The following week it was three people. Then it was empty. Empty trips from Davisville down,” said McKinnon.

“They were just gone.”