Lascours Lockdown, Day 709

Tuesday, February 22nd.

We checked in with the read-a-thoners over breakfast and saw two-thirds of the Queen Anne crew. Colin and Lydia were absent. The atmosphere seemed quite festive and Eric may have been the most motivated of all.

There was a commotion during my first class of the afternoon. A student asked to leave because she wasn't feeling well. A few minutes later, another student came in yelling for me to call for help because the first student had just fainted in the hallway. By some miracle, she hadn't hit her head when she passed out. When the second student, who is luckily trained in first aid, found her, she was unconscious and all tensed up. It took security about five minutes to get someone to us, which seemed a bit long to me, as they only had to go up a couple flights of stairs. Luckily, it was only a panic attack, and not something more serious. This student was ill with Covid recently and has also recently lost her mother, it seems, as she said she would have to miss class next week due to a legal appointment about her mother's estate. She recovered and came to speak to me after class. She said she had been feeling very stressed because she doesn't like her current degree program, but doesn't seem to know what else she wants to do. That together with the rest is a pretty potent cocktail. I tried to be sympathetic, understanding and supportive.

I checked in with Rachel again while Sylvain was reading to the girls before bed. She had already read over five hundred pages, which seems like a fine start to me.

The government is reportedly hoping to do away with indoor mask mandates as soon as mid-March. The Health Minister announced today that the conditions that need to be met are: 1. less than 1,500 Covid patients in intensive care, and 2. an incidence rate of between 300 and 500. He predicts it will take about three weeks to reach these levels.