The global COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the lives of millions of Canadians, putting people out of work, forcing them to stay home and cancelling most forms of entertainment.
For baseball fans, April is normally one of the most looked-forward-to months of the year, as professional baseball returns to the airwaves and stadiums are packed with hot dog-devouring, cap-wearing fans of America's favourite pastime.
While the players are on standby, so too are the people that bring you the games, as broadcasters have been left without teams to cover as the MLB season sits on hiatus.
For Blue Jays Central host Jamie Campbell, the delayed start to the MLB season has been anything but an increase in free time, as he's volunteered his time with Conquer COVID-19, a volunteer-driven organization that has been helping get critical supplies to the health-care community during the pandemic.
"I'm honestly busier now than if I had a baseball season to tend to every day," said Campbell, who stopped at Health Sciences North on April 17 to drop off 102 boxes of N95 masks and 50 boxes of ear loop masks.
"I'm so accustomed to a routine. Like every person that works in baseball, there's a routine that revolves around the start of the game, and I know every single day during a baseball season what I need to accomplish. This crisis has thrown that all out of whack, and my workload has increased so much so that I find myself exhausted when I get to bed every night."
Campbell made a two-day trip through the Northern Ontario cities of Timmins, North Bay and Sudbury on April 16 and 17, with Sudbury's Health Sciences North as the final stop of the trip.
"The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges and very uncertain times for everyone. However, the one constant bright spot has been the solidarity and generosity of the community. We greatly appreciate the efforts of local post-secondary institutions as well as the donations and generosity of the dozens of other businesses, organizations and individuals who have donated supplies," said HSN in an email to Sudbury.com.
"We are happy to say that supplies continue to be delivered and our supply of personal protective equipment remains adequate."
As a Southern Ontario native who has spent the last two decades working in the Greater Toronto Area, Campbell admits he wasn't too familiar with the province's north, but wanted to jump in and help wherever possible and he does have a tie to Timmins that dates all the way back to 1984.
"I pursued (Northern Ontario) because when I saw Hayley Wickenheiser's initial tweet, I had looked into some of the responses to the plea that she made and I noticed a paramedic from Timmins responding to Hayley saying 'we need as much PPE up here as we can get,” said Campbell.
"Back in the summers of 1984 and 1985 I was what was called a junior forest ranger, it's a program that the Ontario government used to run, and when you're a high school student you could go up for an entire summer and work in labour for the Ministry of Natural Resources, so for two summers I was assigned to a camp just outside of Timmins. So that's how I became attached to that city, and when I saw that paramedics' tweet I reached out to Haley immediately and volunteered my services.
“When they started mapping out assignments for volunteer drivers, I said I know there's need in Northern Ontario and there's a city up there that's important to me, and I volunteered to drive to Timmins and stop anywhere else on the way as need be."
Sudbury ended up as one of those "as need be" locations, and not a moment too soon.
Campbell had just finished loading up the SUV that was donated by Volvo and had his route mapped out for stops in Timmins and North Bay, and before he decamped from the storage facility where the Conquer COVID-19 team has their cache of PPE, an email came in from Health Sciences North.
"I had my car half full and was literally ready to pull out and I checked my email and I had a message from Suzanne Pelletier at Health Sciences North. I stopped the car and took another half an hour to load up supplies to take to Sudbury," said Campbell.
All of the PPE distributed through Conquer COVID-19 is donated to the organization, or purchased with monetary donations that have been coming in.
The drive up north was one that Campbell wasn't too familiar with, and with many restaurants closed along the route, he didn't get to experience the full scope of a road trip to Northern Ontario. Campbell did however stay at a Holiday Inn Express in Timmins and had high praise for the safety measures the hotel was taking.
"They have a policy up there where when someone checks out of a room they let it sit for three days and no one goes in there, then a cleaning staff goes in and cleans it, then they let it sit for another three days," said Campbell.
"So every room up there goes unused for six full days, so I reached out to a doctor just to be sure it would be safe to stay there and he told me that it was and was probably one of the safest places I could be, given the procedures they were taking."
While his stay in the trio of Northern Ontario cities were short, Campbell was taken aback by the beauty of the region as witnessed through the windows of his vehicle.
"The drive down from Timmins to Sudbury, which I've never done, was just spectacular," said Campbell.
The response Campbell received on his trip through North Bay, Timmins and Sudbury resonated with him, especially in Timmins, where one paramedic was moved to tears.
"Everyone was amazing, I was getting questions like 'you actually drove all this way to drop off PPE?' so that was really amazing," said Campbell.
"I stopped to visit with the EMS workers and there was a paramedic in Timmins, he was in tears...they're the people that are on the frontlines that are using this equipment to go and risk their lives, I'm not doing that. I think what got to him was that a person he's seen on tv from the big city actually gives a hoot, and he told me that through direct messages later and that's really meaningful to me because he wouldn't know how important places like Timmins and North Bay and Sudbury are to me, because a lot of important checkpoints in my life have taken place in cities like that."
