Greg Wycliffe - April 12, 2023


Paramedic had spare time for TikTok videos during peak COVID Hysteria in Toronto Canada

Topics
failing health care system
Hosted by
Greg Wycliffe
Mentioned
Scarlett Martin Patrick Phillips Sarah C. Mark Peralo Omicron
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Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

166.9

Word count

1,783

Sentence count

162

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I chat with Paramedic Scarlett Martin, who was on the ground in the Greater Toronto Area during the Black Plague pandemic. We talk about the impact the pandemic had on the health care system, the lack of resources to respond to the crisis, and the ongoing lack of support for first responders.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 At the beginning of the pandemic, the hospitals were empty.
00:00:03.080 People were afraid to go to the hospital.
00:00:04.920 They would stay at home and we would do sudden deaths at people's homes, which is part of our job.
00:00:10.100 But the sad story was always the same, that they'd had chest pain for two or three days,
00:00:15.380 but they didn't want to go to the hospital because they were so overrun.
00:00:18.140 So I'm here with a paramedic from the Greater Toronto area, Scarlett Martin.
00:00:23.560 How are you doing this afternoon, Scarlett?
00:00:26.020 I'm good. How are you doing?
00:00:27.600 I'm doing well. I'm doing well.
00:00:29.020 I've we've chatted before.
00:00:30.480 You've told me some crazy stories being a paramedic during lockdowns and everything.
00:00:35.800 If I'm not mistaken, you're back to work now.
00:00:37.880 And are things back to where they were before the pandemic?
00:00:41.680 Or are there things that are still like still hanging around as if we were still under lockdown?
00:00:46.700 Like are there still policies in place from during COVID?
00:00:51.940 Oh, yeah. Yeah.
00:00:53.660 Health care continues to be a disaster.
00:00:56.320 One of the big problems is the hospitals have not updated their vaccination policies in Ontario.
00:01:03.880 Most other provinces they have.
00:01:06.580 So that's really exacerbated the nursing shortage, right?
00:01:10.240 You have thousands of nurses that could be, you know, able-bodied, ready to return to work. 0.99
00:01:16.860 And yet they can't because their facilities are keeping vaccination policies in place.
00:01:22.220 Strangely, these vaccination policies are for the primary two-dose series.
00:01:29.180 Remember way back with the Delta variant?
00:01:31.540 So, yes.
00:01:32.720 Right, right.
00:01:34.460 So the essentially outdated, the outdated sort of vaccine, right?
00:01:39.700 Where it's like this was just for the Delta.
00:01:41.500 Now we've moved on to Omicron.
00:01:42.880 So it's like, why would you even need these old vaccines when the virus has allegedly mutated anyway?
00:01:49.360 That's right.
00:01:50.440 And you mentioned different facilities.
00:01:53.460 So is it like, you know, a hospital here, a hospital there?
00:01:57.600 Is there like a regulatory body for nurses or paramedics that also impose the vaccine?
00:02:03.780 Or is it just kind of all over the place in terms of where the mandates still exist?
00:02:08.500 Well, that's the confusion.
00:02:10.000 So there's no mandates.
00:02:11.940 There's just hospital policies.
00:02:14.180 So hospitals are free to make their own policies.
00:02:16.580 So they have to make a vaccination policy.
00:02:19.940 But within that policy, they're free to make allowances for unvaccinated workers.
00:02:25.220 They could have them do antigen testing or something that would be in the best interest of staffing and patients.
00:02:32.140 But, yeah, they continue to hold on to these outdated discriminatory vaccination policies while patients continue to suffer.
00:02:40.560 Crazy.
00:02:40.980 Well, we're going to be talking about this much more this Saturday.
00:02:44.660 I just want to promote the event.
00:02:46.640 Speaking Moistly Live, we're going to be talking about the failing health care system.
00:02:50.320 Scarlett will be there.
00:02:51.320 Dr. Patrick Phillips will be there.
00:02:53.240 And also Sarah C. from Frontline Nurses.
00:02:55.800 It's going to be an uncensored conversation because it's not going to be on YouTube.
00:02:59.080 But there are still tickets available.
00:03:00.900 You can check that out at CanadaPoly.com slash event.
00:03:04.960 It's going to be in Mississauga.
00:03:06.520 You'll get the exact location once you buy the ticket.
00:03:08.760 It's going to be 6 p.m. April 15th on Saturday.
00:03:11.460 I'm really looking forward to it.
00:03:12.780 But you would hope that the health care system would do everything it can to help and protect people and keep them alive, as it were.
00:03:24.080 And it seems as though, especially during the pandemic, and we'll talk a lot more about this on Saturday,
00:03:28.840 but it seems as though they created all this red tape and all these different restrictions and rules that almost were counterintuitive.
00:03:37.020 People were missing surgeries.
00:03:38.560 People were missing treatment.
00:03:40.540 And again, has that still carried over?
00:03:45.040 Is there still a lot of weird extra testing that happens and extra kind of red tape that paramedics have to work with that are kind of just counterintuitive to actually helping the patient?
00:03:54.520 A lot of the support systems that were taken, you know, they're slowly getting back into place.
00:04:02.300 But I think this will be long lasting, right?
00:04:05.220 The damages that this has caused.
00:04:07.700 Yeah, I think we're finally seeing an end to some of the arbitrary rules that were put in place.
00:04:16.820 So I feel positive about that.
00:04:19.180 Well, that's good.
00:04:19.820 That's good.
00:04:20.620 I know that with a lot of different corporations when it came to the VAX mandates,
00:04:25.400 some of them use the language suspended.
00:04:29.320 We are going to suspend or just suspend.
00:04:31.960 We're not stopping the mandates.
00:04:33.260 We're just suspending them for now.
00:04:36.100 Has there been similar language that you've seen in your industry or in your field where these VAX mandates are just suspended as in kind of almost threatening that,
00:04:47.640 yeah, they might be back soon?
00:04:49.920 Yeah, there is definitely that language.
00:04:51.900 Absolutely right.
00:04:52.900 So there's always the hint of I think they've rescinded but won't hesitate to implement them in the future.
00:05:00.620 Yeah, that can't be very comforting being somebody who is unvaccinated, right?
00:05:05.620 Knowing that it might be next week, next month.
00:05:07.720 Who knows?
00:05:08.140 Oh, yeah.
00:05:08.420 By the way, you can only keep your job if you take this medical procedure, by the way.
00:05:13.840 Yes.
00:05:14.500 Yeah.
00:05:14.820 Who thought we'd face that, right?
00:05:16.980 Yeah.
00:05:17.560 It's back.
00:05:18.300 It's back.
00:05:18.740 I hope not.
00:05:19.200 But bring us back to some of the worst moments or the most absurd moments, perhaps, during the pandemic.
00:05:28.100 Because I know there's a lot of things you went through.
00:05:29.760 Is there any kind of specific experience that maybe sticks out to you?
00:05:32.980 As a generalization, yeah, I would say that the narrow focus to protect the entire population from a virus,
00:05:42.040 which a lot had very little risk of succumbing to, just narrowly focusing in on that and calling it public health,
00:05:50.600 I always thought was, you know, sadly amusing.
00:05:54.880 Because public health is all-encompassing, as we know, right?
00:05:57.840 It's your mental health.
00:05:58.920 It's everything.
00:06:00.640 Closing gyms, telling people not to exercise in the name of health, right?
00:06:06.500 I mean, if I said that was an oxymoron, that would be an understatement.
00:06:10.140 I think, like, the COVID case counters and the COVID death counters ringing on TVs on CNN and those of us in the front lines were seeing something different, right?
00:06:22.960 We were seeing deaths, but they were deaths of despair and nobody was talking about them.
00:06:28.720 They didn't get to be on the little ticker counter, right?
00:06:31.320 Because, yeah, and I just thought public health, like, yeah, it was certainly unprecedented.
00:06:38.060 Yeah, absolutely.
00:06:40.860 And on TV, it was just overwhelmed hospitals.
00:06:44.900 You know, don't go to the hospital.
00:06:47.640 It's packed there.
00:06:48.780 You know, it's overwhelmed.
00:06:49.980 It's overwhelmed.
00:06:51.200 You know, hospitals are overflowing.
00:06:53.280 And, you know, you invited me to the National Citizens Inquiry, and now a lot of different healthcare professionals are giving their testimony.
00:07:00.220 And some of them are saying, yeah, this was not accurate.
00:07:04.720 The media wasn't really telling the truth here, or at least they were very much exaggerating.
00:07:10.140 Do you have any sort of experiences reflecting that of what you saw?
00:07:15.260 Yeah, absolutely.
00:07:16.100 At the beginning of the pandemic, the hospitals were empty.
00:07:19.500 I mean, people were afraid to go to the hospital.
00:07:23.280 They would stay at home, and we would do sudden deaths at people's homes, which is part of our job.
00:07:29.480 I can't say that that's an unusual part, but the sad story was always the same, that they'd had chest pain for two or three days, but they didn't want to go to the hospital because they were so overrun.
00:07:40.180 You know, the truth is, we got some downtime in the station, which is really nice.
00:07:45.600 I work in a busy part of Ontario, so it's always a welcome treat when you can hang out with your colleagues and, you know, watch a show or something, but not at the expense that the call volumes decrease because people are too terrified to call.
00:07:59.840 You know, that's just absolutely wrong, and if people were on social media, they would also note that at the same time, there was all these TikTok videos, right?
00:08:13.440 And we did them where I work, too, and we did them because we had spare time, right?
00:08:19.400 Like, nobody's making TikTok videos anymore, right?
00:08:22.840 I mean, things are called volumes at its normal, but, you know, those two things both can't be true, that we're so overwhelmed, and we're also having time to do choreographed TikTok videos, right?
00:08:35.640 Like, we just need to look at the big picture now and see what it was.
00:08:40.340 Yeah, yeah.
00:08:41.100 You can't be saving lives and pumping out that great choreographed content at the same time.
00:08:45.480 That doesn't add up.
00:08:46.940 And what was it like?
00:08:49.040 Did you ever make an effort during this time to tell your higher-ups, hey, we are going to people's houses, and they have been terrified to come to the hospital or call the hospital because they think it's overwhelmed and they don't want to, you know, catch a virus or whatever?
00:09:04.840 Did you or anyone you know try to, like, send a message to the higher-ups to kind of let them know about this problem?
00:09:10.760 See, these higher-ups would be not in my field, right?
00:09:15.260 They would be public health officials, right?
00:09:18.160 So, that's where everything was filtering down from.
00:09:21.520 I'm a paramedic, so my higher-ups would just be the next in line here.
00:09:26.260 But I did.
00:09:27.500 I went to the media, and I was willing to sacrifice my career at that point to speak out against it.
00:09:35.060 And I was told that if I didn't have 10 other on-duty staff that would tell the same story, that it would not have credibility.
00:09:46.560 So, and I've heard that time and time again.
00:09:49.880 Like, well, if this was true, everybody would be saying it.
00:09:53.360 But I can tell you that everybody wasn't saying it, right?
00:09:57.320 Right.
00:09:57.740 Well, we're going to be saying it and talking all about it this Saturday at Speaking Moistly Live.
00:10:03.080 I'm really looking forward to chatting with you further there, Scarlett, just for everyone at home.
00:10:08.160 As a reminder, it is happening this Saturday, April 15th, 6 o'clock.
00:10:12.880 Tickets are still available.
00:10:14.000 You can go to Canada.com.
00:10:16.140 CanadaPoly.com slash event.
00:10:18.580 Dr. Patrick Phillips is going to be there, who lost his license as a doctor.
00:10:22.800 And also Sarah C., the founder of Canada's Frontline Nurses, all three of them, with myself and Mark Paralavis.
00:10:30.040 We are going to be having an uncensored conversation about the failures of the healthcare system.
00:10:34.700 Thanks so much for your time today, Scarlett.
00:10:36.660 And, yeah, I'll see you on Saturday.
00:10:39.420 Thank you.
00:10:40.120 Look forward to it.