Alum Nora Loreta pens book on Canada's pandemic failures

Once again, journalist Nora Loreto has made a significant contribution to Canada's pandemic story.

Her newest book, Spin Doctors: How Media and Politicians Misdiagnosed the COVID-19 Pandemic, is a near 400-page summary detailing the pandemic from its beginning to August of 2021.The book covers each wave of the pandemic but views the months detailed through the lens of issues such as racism, misogyny, and ableism. 

Since the pandemic's beginning, Loreto has researched and tracked COVID-related long-term care deaths across Canada. Much of this research is also included in the book.

In the interview below, Loreto discusses her reasoning behind writing this book and her process.

Why did you want to write this book?

[Laughing] I wouldn't say I wanted to. By August 2020, I had been doing data collection every night to try and track deaths within residential care facilities in Canada. And to do that work, I was reading dozens and dozens of articles every night, plus public health pages and obituaries, and eventually GoFundMes. By August, I had probably read thousands of articles. You start to see consistent themes and consistent rhetoric that is not being challenged. You see the same problems happening over and over. And by August, even though the first wave had subsided, there were still common issues that you can see popping up and (I was) going, "Oh, wow, they're not taking this seriously." 

An example is the outbreak at the Maple Leaf Foods factory in Brandon, Man.  happening, in August, at the same time that I made this flash decision to shoot off an outline of a proposal for a new book to Fernwood (which was in the process of printing my last book), so the timing was really funny. But it was very obvious by then that this was a story that would get swallowed up by the frenzied coverage that we are still experiencing. I wanted there to be a record that was being produced while it was happening, so it was fresh and that it was not going to be influenced by time. I was close enough to it then to be able to write. I make many arguments in the book, but my priority was to just get things written down, knowing that a lot of it would disappear into the ether, because of how communications have been moving so fast during this pandemic.

Did the book feel like a natural progression for you, or was it a snap decision?

It was a snap decision. The proposal took me probably less than 30 minutes to write, which anybody who’s written a book proposal will know is s very, very weird. That's not normal. And it took me so little time because it was on my mind. It was very obvious to me what we needed to do and how it needed to be written. So I quickly wrote this proposal and I sent it to my editor at Fernwood.  It stayed pretty much the same. I had some question marks. Like, "Here's an open chapter in case something happens we need to cover that."  When I was proposing this, we didn't even have vaccines.

The vaccine information is very limited. So I was just like, I think we'll probably have a vaccine, so there will be the vaccine chapter sometime in the future. It was very, very fast, not something that I had at all planned. At no point between April and that moment was I interested in writing a book about the pandemic. It didn't even occur to me. When it did occur to me, and I was probably in the shower, I said, "Oh, my gosh, I have to do this," which is basically how I get all my ideas. Then it was obvious. This is something that definitely needs to happen, and it needs to happen fast. 

My proposal was for a book that would come out in April 2022, and the editorial collective of Fernwood said, "We love this. Can you do it for fall 2021?" 

Did you have any notes from your research during the beginning of the pandemic, or was it more "in the moment?"

I was writing in the moment. I didn't take any notes. Because as I said, I wasn't prepared to write a book. What I did have, though, were all the articles I had written because by then, I'd probably written 10or so about the pandemic for different publications. So I had been thinking about residential care. And that brings you into long-term care, but also prisons and shelters. And then that brings you into the world of COVID spread in sleeping quarters, which is pretty much the biggest spreader when you're sleeping in close proximity to people, which is why the highest amount of spread happens in the home. That's also why it made these facilities the most dangerous. So I had that in the back of my mind. 

I had whatever I had saved for my articles.  The way I tracked my sources, you'll see there is a f*cking lot of them. I just use a Google spreadsheet or an Excel spreadsheet. I started my Excel spreadsheet in October when I started writing. I had to come up with a writing schedule because making these deadlines would be an enormous task. I calculated from October until the end of March, if I could crank out 2,500 words, net, which means more than that, per week, I'd be able to write the book. 

By the end of March (using this calculation), what I end up having s a complete manuscript, 75 per cent finished, and I would have to add another 25 per cent, which would happen through August 2021 to ensure that I can capture what's actually happening.

How did you organize your research so as not to get lost in the broader topics you discuss, like racism, misogyny, ableism, et cetera?

Part of the proposal was to see this pandemic through the lens of those issues. From the start, that's what I had imagined. I imagined the chapters being a month at a time, but the months weren't necessarily talking about what happened in that month because there were all of these issues. You can imagine picking a random month, September 2020. You can talk about racism. You can talk about schools. You can talk about misogyny. You can talk about the economy. All of those things happened in September 2020. So I started to come up with the large issues I wanted to make sure we covered. 

Racism and systemic racism were such a big issue in the pandemic and such a big thing I wanted to tackle that it was very obvious to me that it would be its own month. The food industry was a chapter with a lot of migrant workers. And I thought that that would all make sense because they all work in food. Then you realize there's way too much for this to be one chapter. So I had to break them up into two chapters. 

The book did not have enough Indigenous content in its first draft, so I had to go back and make sure that I was adding to different analyses. And partly that was because I focused so much on the first wave whereas Indigenous communities really got hit by later waves, so I had to make sure that I was capturing that.  As you start writing, you write yourself in a certain direction. In the end, we ended up adding another chapter to make sure that we could fit everything in. 

You have so much information in one space for a relatively short time frame. How did you think about organizing this book in a way that makes it easy for readers to follow?

I think, thanks to my journalism background, I write like that. Normally, I take a lot of issues and try to make sure that they are digestible or readable or not too intimidating. And I approach my longer-form writing in the exact same way. But because I wanted this to be a record, I didn't want to forget anything. And when you're trying to make sure everything is in there, you go back, and you do the editing to make sure that it is readable, not overwhelming, and understandable. That was the work that I did from May until August.

Chapter two was probably the hardest to write because I knew the most and I focused the most on long-term care. Most people associate me with long-term care which is weird because I'm not a veteran, long-term care writer. And I was struggling with how to get everything in there. There's a lot missing in the long-term care section, just because of the word count. 

How did you also manage to take care of yourself with all this work?

First of all, I'm kind of hardwired to do that kind of work. So I'm very lucky that this comes kind of naturally for me. I don't stress out about deadlines at all. I don't stress out about huge amounts of work. I would be walking to school to get my kids every day and counting in my mind how much I had to do, where I was, how much I advanced in a certain day. And that was kind of fun for my end-of-the-day routine, which is maybe a bit weird, but I liked it.  

Carving out time to write was not negotiable. I had to do it. And I did. You go to work, you have to do the work you're doing that day, and that was how I approached it. Also, when you're writing about this stuff, and you're seeing the incredible lengths that other people are going to keep others safe or to save lives, or to put food on tables, I mean, all I was doing was my job. It felt like it was my contribution to the pandemic.  How do doctors keep their sanity, how do personal care workers keep their sanity, how do grocery workers keep their sanity when they're getting yelled at by people who aren't wearing masks? We all have our stresses, and this was by no means pushing me to my limit. 

Do you have a favourite section of the book?

Oh, there are a lot of parts in there that I'm very proud of. I put little things in there to make myself laugh, which I hope people will identify. I think that section on the  “premier-dad phenomenon” is very interesting. It was one of my favourite things to write because no one was talking about it, and no one is talking about it like that. 

But to be honest, in every section, there was always something that I was shocked and scandalized about and couldn't believe was true. That's why I like writing books because you find yourself in these little rabbit holes and you don't know where they're going to end up.

What has been the general response to this book?

People have been very, very receptive and very pleased to read it. It's on hold at every library that I looked up in Canada, so maybe it's just a question of there not being enough copies [laughs].

But I have to say that the responses from the press have been pretty disappointing. We've been working really hard to try and get this book noticed by journals.  It's a tall order because I eviscerate a lot of the companies. I try not to eviscerate too many journalists themselves. There's a couple of people who I name, but, by and large, these are structural problems. These are not individual journalist problems. But it has been very hard because there was nothing lined up in terms of interviews for the launch week. A Montreal Gazette reporter wrote a really nice feature, which got syndicated by Postmedia. But because Postmedia syndicated it, it means I'm not going to talk to the Star team or the Vancouver Sun. Then with CBC, I did syndication, which was nice, but the problem with syndication is you just don't have any time. You know, 13 interviews across Canada for five minutes or seven minutes. And it's a book you can talk about for seven minutes, but you kind of need more time. It didn't allow me to talk about the regional issues so much. The conversation is so different when you're talking to someone in Edmonton than talking to someone in Montreal. But aside from that, there's been nothing from CBC at all.

This is the first book about the pandemic in Canada, and if it were written by anyone that wasn't me, there'd be coverage. And it's not so much that it's me, Nora Loreto. If it was written by a man, or anybody who works in media, already has a column somewhere, it would be covered. So that's very, very annoying.

 What do you hope people will get out of this book?

I mean, there's so much. I hope they can forget the pandemic for themselves, and then they just have a reference book. They can open it whenever they want to but then not carry around the weight of memory. I hope that it opens up people's minds to the forces controlling politics in this country, that are controlling political decisions, that are controlling cultural decisions. Not in a way that is conspiratorial, in a way that just plainly identifies the deep problems within Canadian democracy and the Canadian economy. 

I hope it moves people to change. Everything I write is with that desire. But even if not, I want people never again to think that they just didn't know; the politicians just didn't know, public health officers were just doing their best, journalists were just doing what they could. And that actually, every single one of the decisions that every one of those individuals took involved forces well beyond them that were defining for them the decision they would take. We need to change those forces if we have any hope of changing society.

This interview has been condensed and edited.