Today Canada discovered its first two cases of the Covid variant that originated in the United Kingdom.  A couple in Ontario were infected.  They had “no known travel history, exposure or high-risk contacts”.  Woh!  How did that happen?  The virus is so incredibly transmissible, defying normal reason.

The Earth is a big place.  How exactly did Covid reach Samoa and Fiji in the mid-Pacific Ocean, Greenland and … Antarctica!  On December 22, CTV News reported that “three dozen people have reportedly contracted Covid-19 at a Chilean research base in Antarctica, which for months was the only landmass untouched by the global pandemic.”

I wonder if anything else could go viral.

How about love?

Sometime in the 1980’s, I was crossing a parking lot in Lethbridge, Alberta.  A woman of perhaps East Indian origin was walking towards me.  As we got closer, she smiled and said “Hello.”  I mean a real hello, one that said “I see who you are.  I honour who you are.”  Thirty some years later, she is still with me.  Do you think a “little” gesture of contact like that could change the world?  I do.  What if each of us did the same thing for someone, with the same grandness of heart, only once in our remaining years?  That’s a lot of loving hellos.

In virus talk, the R Number is “a way of rating coronavirus’s ability to spread.  R is the number of people that one infected person will pass on a virus to, on average.”  If we want the virus to subside, the R Number needs to be less than 1.0.

I propose an L Number, a way of rating the ability of love to spread.  Genuine smiles will do nicely.  If for the rest of your life you aimed a lingering smile at two people rather than one, and if everyone else did the same, our L Number would be 2.0.

And a Lovedemic would take over the planet