“Stay Home” is now our civic ethos, and when we are home, we are heroes. Isolation, though, is unequal: we may all be in this together, but it’s in vastly different circumstances.

Consider the extremes. If cooped up in a big suburban house with many rooms and a big back yard, or in one of those Forest Hill or North Toronto manses, there’s a lot of space to spread out. There are rooms for exercise equipment in some homes. Dens to work in. Playrooms. Even houses in many of the new, cheek-by-jowl subdivisions in Milton or Markham have postage stamp yards where the kids and pets can wear themselves out or where one can stand in the sunshine to feel normal for a bit.

On the other side are the basement apartment dwellers, with little light or outdoor space of their own, some with ceilings so low that heads must be cocked when standing up. Similarly, though up higher in the air, are people living in tiny apartments and condos, many without a balcony to occasionally stand on, no room for even a yoga mat for exercise. Moreover, many small apartments have entire extended families living in them. These people are really in it together.

We all live in conditions somewhere on a spectrum between these kinds of living spaces, and COVID-19 has made it starkly clear how precious public spaces like sidewalks and parks are in crowded cities.

This week, Toronto and other municipalities made the decision to close playgrounds and other park amenities like basketball courts, while still allowing access to open, green spaces as long as physical distancing is adhered to. This follows the closing of national and provincial parks and various conservation areas across Ontario after photos and videos of irresponsible people clumping together last weekend were circulated.

Some of those clumpers were probably willful idiots, some just ignorant, but I’ve been thinking about how difficult it is, conceptually, to practise physical distancing. Walking away from and far around people goes against everything we’ve been taught. It feels so rude, though it’s now the ultimate show of social respect and trust.

Maybe an ironic, bright side of this is that, after years of being told society is ever-more distant and isolated, when we actually pay attention to it, as the coronavirus forces us to, we still crave and can’t resist human contact.

We must resist though. These closures were the right decision to make, even if admitting that is painful. Maybe we needed a shock like this, of seeing playground equipment wrapped in yellow tape and plastic bags over basketball nets, to drive home how serious the COVID-19 threat is.

Despite the facts, despite the heart-wrenching pleas from health care workers on the front lines, it is still an invisible threat unless you’ve been personally touched by it, and human behaviour and lifestyle are the hardest things to change.

Still, as this isolation goes on, access to public space for mental and physical health will be an increasing issue, especially for those with no access to it where they live now or if conditions inside their home are, at best, unpleasant, or at worst, violent. Getting out provides a kind of pressure release, an escape, from so much time cooped up and municipalities will have to grapple with this challenge.

I worry, too, about our ability, en masse, to be true to the “stay home” ethos as time goes on without a pressure release. Let’s not lose this last grace in a terrible time and give each other the space we need to stay safe and healthy. That applies to us too, fellow joggers.

To help facilitate this in an incredibly dense part of the city, not just to give people room to exercise but also a way to get to stores safely, Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam has called for the closing of some lanes of Yonge Street in order to expand pedestrian space. Toronto in general has miserly sidewalks compared to how much space is reserved for cars, whether moving or parked.

Leave a lane open for emergency vehicles and the current trickle of traffic, but this is the kind of initiative that should happen quickly on Yonge and in other dense parts of the city.

It’s been a strange week, watching people snipe at one another for going on responsible walks, a kind of ambulatory “J’Accuse...!”, as tension around COVID-19 increases. At the same time, Ontario released a very long list of jobs deemed “essential” during this not-so-locked-down lockdown.

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Condo construction, dry cleaning and other industries are allowed to continue apace. I’ve watched a construction crew work on a walk-up apartment building across the street all week, each worker in close proximity to each other, sharing tools and even lunch together. The definition of essential has been stretched.

We are all stretched right now, in unequal conditions. Stay home as much as you can and give all the distance you can when out in the spaces we have left.

Shawn Micallef is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @shawnmicallef