We don’t even have to ask.

About whether you’ve got friends and family who have gotten COVID, that is. Because we all know the truth: lots and lots of people are getting it. Everyone is talking about it, all over.

Maybe you’ve gotten it, too. Maybe you’ve got it right now.

Sure, lots of people have dodged COVID for two years. No longer: their luck has run out. And, now, it certainly seems like more people are getting sick than ever before.

COVID-19 — which never really left — is back. With a vengeance.

In Ontario, to cite just one example, it’s estimated that 30,000 people are now getting sick every single day. We have to use “estimates,” unfortunately, because Canadian governments have basically abandoned their obligation to carefully track how many of us are getting sick.

But some things we do know. Here in Ontario, again, 173 patients were in intensive care units on Tuesday — 96 of those patients required a ventilator to breathe. That number is up from last week. Meanwhile, yet more deaths — a total of 12,479 so far. And, tellingly, hospitalizations on Tuesday climbed past the 1,000 mark, for the first time since February.

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We can blame governments — of all stripes and at all levels — for what’s happening. But they’re only partly to blame. We’re to blame, too. Because, if we’re being honest with ourselves, we all know one thing has created the sixth wave more than any other.

Too many people have stopped wearing masks.

That’s a big mistake, and we’re now all paying the price. Here’s five simple reasons why we need to resist the temptation to toss out our masks. Clip and save.

They work — to some, even better than vaccines. The director of the Center for Disease Control has testified in Congress that masks have been “the most powerful tool’ in the war against COVID.

“We have clear scientific evidence they work, and they are our best defence,” Dr. Robert Redfield said. “I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine.”

Vaccines work, sure. But their effectiveness fades over time. And they don’t cure, they prevent. That’s not all: many people have bona fide reasons for refusing vaccines. But there exists no medical reason for refusing to wear a mask where the circumstances warrant it. Everyone is fed up with masks, of course. But they work. Still.

Masks are logical. COVID, as everyone knows, is spread through respiratory droplets — when a person coughs, sneezes or even talks. Redfield’s CDC says face masks, worn properly, are “particularly important” when you can’t maintain a six-foot distance from someone else. You can still get, and spread, the virus when vaccinated. But if you and everyone around you is wearing the right mask, properly, the risk drops to almost zero.

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Variants come and go. And not all vaccines protect against all variants, either, as we are now experiencing, the hard way. But masks work against every variant to date, and every variant that is coming our way. Whatever their genetic mutations, masks protect against any strain of COVID.

You know masks work. You know it. The outbreaks we are now seeing, everywhere, aren’t because people stopped getting vaccinated — they’re still getting vaccinated, and in record numbers in places like Ontario. It’s not necessarily because we got rid of vaccine passports, either, although that likely didn’t help.

The big change?

People stopped wearing masks. And COVID infections have gotten worse, and are getting worse every day.

The pandemic isn’t over. COVID-19 isn’t done with us. Get vaccinated, if you can. Socially distance and hand-wash, all that.

But don’t toss out your mask. Too many people did — and now too many people are getting sick.

— Kinsella was chief of staff to a federal Liberal minister of health

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So, I’m Catholic.

Irish Catholic, in fact. Every Irish Catholic knows what that means, pretty much. Uncles who were priests, aunts who were nuns, Church every Sunday, the sacraments, all of it.

When they were younger, my four kids came to church with me. Most of my closest friends, like my Sun colleague Brian Lilley, are Catholics too. We talk about it.

Still proud I was taught by Jesuits. Still wear a blessed Joan of Arc medal around my neck. Still went to church when I was in a punk band in Calgary, even, sitting at the back in a biker jacket and wearing a homemade Clash T-shirt.

Still pray every night: Our Father, Hail Mary, Act of Contrition, Glory Be. Every single night. I pray for all of you, even the jerks. (Especially the jerks.)

So I was and am a Catholic. But then I kind of stopped.

The pandemic was part of it, of course. All around the world, churches and synagogues and mosques were forced to close their doors, to prevent the spread of the virus. That was sad, because that was probably the time we all needed them the most.

But if their doors had still been open, I still wouldn’t have gone to Catholic Mass. Because they had kind of broken my heart. And enraged me. And shocked me. And disgusted me.

It was the discovery of those 200 bodies in Kamloops that did it. Children and babies, whose only sin had been to be born indigenous.

And who were stolen from their parents and their families, and taken to prisons — because that’s what they were, really, prisons for children — where they would be beaten and tortured and abused. And sometimes killed.

Thousands of them, dead. And we know that many of them were killed, because they were dropped into unmarked graves, like they were garbage.

Murderers favour unmarked graves. So, apparently, did the Catholic Church.

So I stopped going. Or, at least, stopped believing.

I wasn’t alone. When I wrote about the subject, I heard from many Catholics — friends, family members, total strangers — who had reached the same decision. We had put up with serial stupidities in our church for years. But the residential school genocide? That pushed us out the door.

For me, there was a personal reason, too. My oldest, my daughter, is Indigenous. She is a citizen of a Yukon First Nation. And I love her dearly.

After the revelations came out about what the Catholic Church did at the Canadian residential so-called schools, how could I still be a practicing Catholic, and look my daughter in her beautiful face? How could I be her dad, and still be a Catholic? I didn’t know how to do that.

On Friday, the Pope finally did what long needed to be done: He accepted responsibility. He apologized for what the Catholic Church had done to Indigenous children, the ones from not so long ago. The ones who look very much like like my daughter.

Here is what he said:

“I ask for God’s forgiveness and I want to say to you with all my heart, I am very sorry, and I joined my brothers, the Canadian bishops, in asking your pardon clearly. The content of the faith cannot be transmitted in a way contrary to faith itself.”

“I also feel shame and I’m saying it now … for the role that the number of Catholics, particularly those with educational responsibilities, have had and all these things that wounded you (and) the abuse you suffered, and in the lack of respect shown for your identity and culture.”

Afterword, I talked to my daughter about it. I told her I would be writing this column and that I would be talking about her in it. She said that was OK.

We talked about whether we could go back to Mass. Whether we could feel like we belong to a church that actually practices love, and just doesn’t talk about it.

“Let’s see what the Pope says and does when he comes to Canada,” my daughter said. I agreed with her.

Being a Catholic means being on a journey, not reaching a destination.

Let’s see where the Catholic Church ends up.

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