Juno News - March 24, 2021


Are Canadians aware of the facts about COVID-19？


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

194.26204

Word count

641

Sentence count

29

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

What do Canadians actually think about coronavirus? What do they actually know about what's going on right now in the United States? What would the Canadian response to this pandemic be if it were coming to Canada?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 What do Canadians actually think about coronavirus facts and statistics? What did they actually know
00:00:12.460 about what's going on right now? And I asked that question genuinely because I was reading this
00:00:18.380 recent poll in the United States by Gallup poll. They're one of the largest pollsters in the U.S.
00:00:23.220 in the world. And they spoke to 35,000 Americans and they asked them a number of questions to gauge
00:00:28.760 the American perspectives on what they think is happening versus what is actually happening.
00:00:34.740 And there was one question about hospitalization rates. And they asked, if you get coronavirus,
00:00:40.320 what are your odds of winding up in the hospital? Now, the answer to that question is one to five
00:00:44.620 percent. That's the hospital rate, depending on where you are in terms of first wave, second wave,
00:00:50.520 different demographics and parts of the country and so forth. That's the top line rate.
00:00:53.780 Now, Gallup found that about 40 percent of Democrats, 30 percent of Republicans, so I guess
00:00:59.140 a third of people over a third of all respondents, they said 50 percent or more that that was your
00:01:05.600 chance. You had basically a one in two chance of being hospitalized if you got coronavirus. That is
00:01:11.420 just massively wrong from what the actual facts and statistics show. What would the Canadian response
00:01:18.440 be? I think it would be pretty similar or maybe even worse because we have a real problem here in
00:01:23.580 Canada when it comes to breaking down the actual facts, the context and the nuance in a way that
00:01:29.940 I think is really damaging to people. And it's certainly affecting levels of support we have for
00:01:35.260 lockdowns and sort of the psychological toll this is taking on people. I was reminded of a story that
00:01:40.980 was up on the CBC website not too long ago where it quoted two older Canadians who were in their
00:01:46.160 70s and they were talking about various different concerns about the pandemic and they said,
00:01:50.820 look, the truth is, if we get this virus, odds are we're going to wind up taken up in a hospital bed
00:01:56.140 and we're going to be dead. And I thought, I don't know if these folks have any underlying
00:02:02.100 conditions or what have you. They seem to be pretty healthy. They didn't mention anything, but
00:02:06.060 that's not what the facts show at all. Why did these folks think that? And not only why did these
00:02:12.140 folks think that, but why did CBC run that quote? I mean, I can tell you there are many times where
00:02:17.540 you're speaking to a source for a story and they're saying many interesting things, but
00:02:20.660 you know, maybe one or two lines they'll say, you go, oh, I don't know about that. That's not,
00:02:24.820 you know, really an accurate line. So you don't put it in the story. Why did this journalist think
00:02:30.300 it was appropriate to quote these older Canadians who were just wrong? And it's just right there in that 0.96
00:02:36.960 CBC story. And there's no attempt to fact check that statement they made that, well, we'll certainly
00:02:42.120 encourage and enable other readers to read that and think that statement is true. So it would be
00:02:46.880 really interesting to get some polling done. We got a lot of polling in Canada about political
00:02:51.100 support, who supports liberals, conservatives, and so forth. We got a lot of polling, but do you
00:02:55.560 support lockdowns and so forth? And actually a lot of Canadians really do support lockdowns. I think
00:03:00.060 maybe one reason they do support lockdowns though is because they don't actually understand
00:03:04.480 the facts and statistics. And it would be really interesting if a Canadian pollster went out into
00:03:09.980 the field and started asking some basic questions about perception versus reality. It would be really
00:03:15.680 curious to see the results of that poll.