If you ask Robert Strang whether his entire career has been spent preparing for COVID-19 he will, in the manner of a soldier asked about war, say of course not, because no one, least of all a chief medical officer of health, wants a pandemic.
“But it is here,” he told me in October between the first and second waves of the coronavirus. “And we have to deal with it.”
Then, being a Christian man, with an abiding belief that we are all here to serve others, he said that every human is given certain strengths and opportunities.
His opportunity, Strang felt, was the chance to become a public health physician — which allowed him to create “long-lasting solutions instead of band-aids" which, he felt, had been the case in his earlier career as a GP -- and then a chief medical officer.
“My job,” he added, “is to do what I can with that.”
The pandemic, then, has been his time of truth, and our province’s response to it Strang’s defining moment, which is why I am writing about him here today.
It would frankly be enough to say that Strang’s reassuring presence during the daily COVID updates — his rugby lock’s bulk a contrast to Stephen McNeil’s angularity — helped many of us get through some of the hardest months of 2020.
Except he wasn’t just a calm, consistent communicator who we trusted to tell us where we stood and what was next. Or was he merely a figure-head, the front man in the province’s strategy for keeping the pandemic at bay?
He was, in addition to all of that, the guy advising McNeil about what we need to, with the barbarians at the gate. Our province’s handling of the pandemic, which has been the envy of the world, shows his counsel was wise.
It has been, of course, a team effort from top to bottom. ”Public health is not something done in isolation,” Strang told me.
Guiding us through the pandemic, in my view, has been McNeil’s finest hour as premier.
Strang, though, remains the doctor who feels that “my patient is the almost one-million people of Nova Scotia.”
His face, above all others, may be the one that those who lived through the challenging days of 2020, associate with our success repelling COVID.
Heroic narratives, after all, need heroes, even if reluctant ones like Strang. Charities raised more than $8,000 with a Christmas tree festooned with the colourful, goofy ties with which Strang livens up the daily COVID updates.
Our top doc was the celebrity marshal at the recent Chronicle Herald Holiday Parade of Lights.
Just last month, a video in which Strang made a surprise visit to the house of a seven-year-old boy went viral. The chief medical officer and the youngster, you see, were both born with a cleft palate.
I can personally attest that complete strangers stop Strang on the street to thank him for keeping them safe.
All of this, of course, could change tomorrow. If the COVID cases suddenly began to soar the credit for our coronavirus strategy could suddenly be transformed into blame and finger-pointing.
As I write this, though, such a fall from grace seems unlikely.
Our leadership’s willingness to lock down the activities and institutions that needed locking down has spared us the agony of provinces in which economic prosperity and personal freedom trump communal safety.
The Atlantic bubble, meanwhile, kept the economy percolating along well enough that in December Nova Scotia recorded the lowest unemployment rate in the country.
Success, it must be said, breeds success.
It stands to reason that Nova Scotians are more likely to follow Strang and McNeil’s directions when they feel that acting that way actually works — just as an NBA team is willing to follow a strategy that requires them to sacrifice individual stats, because it just might win them the Larry OB.
So, why not think of Strang, a high school basketball standout, as our Nick Nurse, sitting at the end of our collective bench. He’s got us working as a team, hopefully into the second round of the playoffs now, all eyes on the finals.
