LONDON, U.K. -- What would Don do?
Anybody who knew Dr. Don Low is asking the same question today, in the midst of our horrible, shared trauma. And he is deeply missed -- for so many reasons.
When the SARS epidemic was spreading outward from China in 2003, Don was the calm voice and steady hand who talked Canada through this mysterious new infection.
I didn’t know him then, but here’s the backstory, and it’s a good one. Love in the time of the plague.
Night after night, as Don appeared on television, calmly soothing the nation’s anxiety, there was something else going on. He and the CBC’s health correspondent, Maureen Taylor, were becoming smitten. Her friends watched it happen.
I know all this because her colleague at the time was Mellissa Fung. They covered SARS together, and Don was always asking, “Where’s Maureen?”
Five years later, they all went to Italy for a summer wedding.
(Photo: Dr. Don Low and Maureen Taylor at their wedding. Credit: Mellissa Fung)
Don loved it when Maureen’s close friends -- all women -- would crowd into their Toronto kitchen for Sunday dinners. From time to time, I was the male exception, visiting from Washington, D.C. We would drink, he wouldn’t. Microbiologists knew better.
And then suddenly, he was gone, dead of a brain tumour. The health community lost a brilliant scientist and leader. Maureen, and those around her, lost much more. It didn’t really help to rage and cry at the unfairness. Don understood. He was self-diagnosing to the end.
Now, as COVID-19 ravages the globe, Maureen is a physician assistant in infectious diseases, treating people with the virus at Michael Garron Hospital in Toronto. She went from medical correspondent to front-line health-care worker, suiting up against a deadly infection that doesn’t have a cure. We worry.
“It’s week 4 for me on the COVID-19 beat,” she wrote yesterday. “It’s lonely for sure, not being able to see family or friends in person.”
(Photo: Maureen Taylor, Physician Assistant in Infectious Diseases at Michael Garron Hospital in Toronto. Credit: Enoch Choo)
Most of the people she treats are men. Yesterday some of her new patients were refugees who picked up the virus at a North Toronto shelter.
“So,” she cautioned, “those outbreaks are starting to take off.”
Maureen never really left journalism, and nobody ever expected she would. She was the one who posed the question -- “What would Don do? -- in a blog for the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
“Don died of a brain tumour in 2013,” she wrote, “still warning me and anyone else who would listen that the world was ‘overdue’ for a pandemic.”
Don wasn’t always right, she joked, but he was this time.
He saw COVID-19 coming, or something equally insidious, and urged health care systems to get ready for it by stockpiling medical supplies, and hiring more researchers. It’s not so obvious they listened.
He studied plagues. He knew how runaway infections became epidemics, and how epidemics grew into pandemics. He was fascinated by the influenza outbreak of 1917 and the “social distancing” measures put in place to stop it. COVID-19 has taken the world a lot further, Dr. Low.
Much of the earth is in lockdown, which a few weeks ago seemed impossible, unimaginable. Poor countries, with barely functioning health-care systems, have told their entire populations to stay at home. India has essentially put 1.3 billion people into quarantine.
The great city of London, now our city, has gone into a ghostly hibernation. No friends coming for Sunday dinner. No shopping at Marylebone market. No pub lunches. No theatre in Shakespeare’s England.
So, let’s ask again: What would Don do?
“Of this I am sure,” wrote Maureen. “Don would consider COVID-19 The Big One. And if he were here, he’d roll up his sleeves, wash his hands and get to work.”
(Photo: Maureen Taylor, Physician Assistant in Infectious Diseases at Michael Garron Hospital in Toronto. Credit: Mellissa Fung)
