Juno News - A ＂COVID-Zero＂ approach is not sustainable

00:00:00.000 There have been a lot of attempts to pretty much bully all Canadians into buying into the notion

00:00:11.500 of COVID-0. Extreme lockdowns, super tight, just four to six weeks, they promise. That's all. And

00:00:18.680 then it eradicates coronavirus. You get to pretty much zero cases, and then you can go on and live

00:00:24.320 your life again. None of these mockdowns, they say, of pretty much every other extreme lockdown

00:00:28.900 that's happened in Canada. We got to do it tougher than ever our way, and we promise it will succeed.

00:00:34.680 And one of the places they like to point to as a great example is New Zealand, parts of Australia,

00:00:40.060 and the Atlantic bubble. They say, look, they did it in Atlantic Canada. Well, the past few days,

00:00:45.800 those voices for COVID-0, one thing they have not been amplifying is what's going on in Nova Scotia

00:00:51.220 right now. If you take a look at the coronavirus case chart for Nova Scotia since, well, the beginning

00:00:56.420 of the pandemic until pretty much now, you see it's pretty much flatline, maybe one little bump,

00:01:00.520 a tiny little bump, flatline, and then bam, jumps up big time. Nova Scotia is seeing the highest by

00:01:07.000 leaps and bounds number of daily coronavirus cases that they have ever seen before. And now they are

00:01:12.340 in a very tight lockdown. Well, hold on. What's going on? You told us be like Atlantic Canada. You said

00:01:19.000 just one and done, six weeks, that's all. You don't just flatten the curve, you eliminate it,

00:01:24.200 and then everything is back to normal and you never have to do it again. Until apparently,

00:01:30.300 you do. And maybe until you have to do it again, a time after that, as Nova Scotia is showing us.

00:01:35.720 And there have been districts in Australia where they shut things down as well. I know we're told

00:01:40.100 Australia has done such a great job, but when Ontario was grappling with the fact that playgrounds

00:01:45.100 had been shut down there, it only lasted for 24 hours until people rebelled and then the government

00:01:49.660 reversed the decision. Well, parts of Australia, they'd actually shut down their playgrounds

00:01:54.560 in 2021 as well, back in February. So it's not like they're completely done with all of these

00:02:00.580 restrictions. So I think the Nova Scotia story is an example of this, this COVID zero zealotry. I

00:02:07.560 don't know what else to call it. Just is not accurate. I remember first hearing the phrase

00:02:11.900 learning to live with COVID from French president Emmanuel Macron. Now they've grappled with a whole

00:02:16.980 bunch of different approaches in France, but he first articulated this as a goal back, well,

00:02:21.540 I don't know, like June or so of last year, quite a while ago. And they've been trying to strike a

00:02:26.420 delicate balance there. Obviously, France has had a lot of challenges, but I still think having that

00:02:30.660 conversation or at least acknowledging that COVID zero is just not a thing. An endemic illness that

00:02:38.260 all experts pretty much acknowledge is here to stay in one form or another, hopefully in a way

00:02:42.940 where we managed to very much minimize serious outcomes and deaths, but still around out and

00:02:48.420 about in society, where if you're saying the key metric is cases and that you have to get to pretty

00:02:53.920 much zero cases, well, we're learning time and time again, that that's just not really a feasible

00:02:59.780 thing. Hopefully Nova Scotia manages this situation as best as possible and gets out of it and gets out

00:03:05.840 of lockdown and minimizes serious outcomes. But their situation is also just a teachable moment about

00:03:11.220 COVID zero, Atlantic bubble. I don't know, guys, you can't make that your goal for all of Canada

00:03:17.360 because it's just not sustainable in the long run.

Juno News - May 09, 2021