As the Coronavirus spreads throughout the world, life here in Toronto seems strangely normal.

There is no panic in the streets. Our public health response, from the local to federal levels, is largely coherent and unified, a trusted message with little reason to doubt it.

Thank goodness, this response has not been politicized much, as it has been at the federal level in the U.S., although some here are trying to do that. Resist it! In this calm before the possible storm, a clear sense of cooperation and preparedness is a comfort. Mixed messages and infighting would muddle our understanding of the pandemic and what we need to do to protect ourselves.

Perhaps the GTA is calm, too, because we’ve been through this before with SARS, but, as reports from cities such as Milan, Rome and Wuhan describe once-crowded public spaces as nearly empty, akin to a vision from some apocalyptic film, our normalcy is under scrutiny.

Should it be normal here?

I write some of these words from the big Northern District branch of the Toronto Public Library near the Yonge Street and Eglinton Avenue intersection. It’s busy, as Toronto libraries always are, but isn’t jammed. I could find a table to myself. Sometimes that’s normal on a weekday afternoon, sometimes not. The hand sanitizer at the door is getting regular use. If there is a difference between normal operations, it’s subtle.

At the nearby Starbucks on Yonge, I asked the barista if it’s less busy than normal. “Not really,” he said. “Maybe a little, because it got cold.” Again, the change to urban life, if any, isn’t stark. I ate lunch at a nearby burrito place that’s usually crowded at the time I was there. Hand food, I thought. Maybe people don’t want to eat food with their hands now. I find myself wondering about things I never much wondered about.

An informal, non-scientific survey of Toronto commuters this week revealed some had trips on transit and by car that seemed less crowded than normal, while others reported their regular subway and bus as crowded as usual at rush hour. On the cusp of March Break, which always alters patterns, it all still seems normal, even as the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a pandemic.

Some of the most overt signs are relatively abstract and affect future events, such as cancelling Pearl Jam’s tour kick-off concert in Toronto and other conventions, book launches, and public meetings. Pausing the NBA and NHL seasons, celebrities testing positive for COVID-19, and extending March Break two weeks for Ontario students is quite real, but the city still feels oddly the same.

The occasional person wearing a face mask on the subway might be a sign of something, but there are always a few people wearing masks.

Photos of bare shelves, emptied of disinfecting wipes, toilet paper and other staples are tangible signs. We wait for more to come, and it’s all we talk about.

The relative normalcy is a strange sense of precarious reality. Making plans a few days away or next week seems tentative and non-committal, as everything could change. Plans that involve other people, especially, are made in the shadow of calls for “social distancing.”

That’s a change from even last week, when being out in public was seen as supporting local businesses, especially those facing misplaced and racist backlashes in the Chinese and other communities. Beyond that kind of unfortunate shunning, it’s a tricky line: nobody wants small businesses to fail, as they are the ones that make our city interesting. Arts groups and other non-profits that rely on now-cancelled fundraisers are going to feel the pinch, too.

Knowing when it’s the right time to stay home is why relying on and listening to non-politicized experts is so important.

Just like not touching our faces, social distancing is something that’s hard to do in a crowded city filled with millions of people. The complexity of it is confounding. The thought of self-quarantine and social isolation at home is a profoundly lonely one. Still, start thinking about it now, if the city is shut down, the change won’t be such a shock.

The pandemic has me noticing how many things I touch that other people touch. God bless bathrooms with automatic faucets and doors you can push open with your elbow. Automatic door buttons are being tapped with a lot of wrists and elbows now. I’ve found that time-limited faucets, requiring multiple pushes, make it impossible to do the recommended twenty seconds of hand washing in one go. I’ve started mentally mapping where public hand-sanitizers are.

The awkwardness of greeting people with elbow-bumping, instead of handshaking, has been a communal moment to talk about all this. It’s a relief, really, knowing we’re all in this together.

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And perhaps that’s something we can hold on to at this stage. We’re all in this together, meaning each of our individual actions will affect the people we know and love and strangers, too.

Never in recent memory has our interconnectedness come more into focus, and never has it been more at risk, and risky.

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