Juno News - January 09, 2022


Are Canadians finally fed up with lockdowns？


Episode Stats

Length

3 minutes

Words per Minute

194.65746

Word Count

770

Sentence Count

20


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 I think there's a big shift underway right now in Canada in terms of how people are experiencing
00:00:10.060 COVID-19 and that that is going to cause a shift in terms of how they think about and how they
00:00:15.800 think about government restrictions and the lockdowns that many Canadians now find themselves
00:00:20.800 living under yet again. What shift am I talking about? Well for the longest time from March 2020
00:00:26.380 until well not too long ago a lot of Canadians could still maintain that they didn't really know
00:00:31.520 all that many people who had actually had COVID-19. So when they thought about the virus when they had
00:00:36.440 fears about the virus they had fears about the unknown. But now with the Omicron variant there
00:00:42.940 are a lot of cases all across the country. Thankfully most of them are mild, very mild, asymptomatic and
00:00:51.120 people are sharing their stories. They're telling their family members, their friends, their neighbors,
00:00:56.100 their co-workers. Everybody's now got stories if not of themselves and one of their own immediate
00:01:00.800 family members of of people writing to them, texting them saying yeah I tested positive either
00:01:05.820 through a PCR test or through a rapid test and they're saying I have COVID and of course you text
00:01:10.800 back you call back and say oh well you know how is it I hope you're doing okay. By and large the
00:01:15.380 overwhelming vast majority of people are saying well yeah I don't really have much going on. I have so
00:01:20.580 many experience of that in my life. Everyone I talk to they say they've got similar experiences
00:01:25.360 as well of people saying all of that and I think even people who were previously very supportive
00:01:31.220 of past restrictions, past lockdowns, they're hearing all of this about just how mild it's
00:01:36.300 been for so many people and they're going okay then why are we under lockdown? Why are we facing
00:01:44.080 such tight restrictions on our lives if this is how it's playing out for most people? Now the main answer
00:01:49.760 that public health officials say I think a lot of people actually thought the recent lockdowns were
00:01:54.100 about just protecting you know vaccinated healthy people in their 30s from getting mild Omicron. It wasn't.
00:01:59.360 It was just to protect from the fact that if you have 20,000, 30,000 cases a day even if it's
00:02:04.600 significantly milder you're still going to have a number of people who do have a negative experience.
00:02:09.740 People are still going to have that negative experience. They're going to have to go into the hospital,
00:02:13.280 take up a hospital bed, take up an ICU bed and the officials are looking to deal with that to deter
00:02:18.180 those numbers because they're saying even if we have 300 people in an ICU bed with COVID-19 that's
00:02:24.240 the number they cite in Ontario, 300 people that's enough to put the system at risk. But I think
00:02:30.780 because more and more people are having these conversations about how COVID-19 is actually a
00:02:36.560 milder experience for the vast majority of them who get it, they look at that the hospital argument and
00:02:42.320 go okay well I really feel for these people. You know it's regrettable that they're in the ICU and
00:02:48.160 I want to do whatever we can throw resources at them and and help them out and we want to you know
00:02:53.160 encourage other people to get vaccinated but you have to shut down my kids school even though I now
00:02:59.060 have a firsthand experience with this being very mild and all my friends and neighbors do as well
00:03:03.100 because you're concerned about 300 people being in an ICU bed. That's not adding up
00:03:08.980 for me. Can we kind of try a better way? Can we do something different? Can we do what's called
00:03:14.220 focused protection? We have had untold billions of dollars thrown at the system to deal with COVID-19.
00:03:20.300 Can we just scale up a little bit? Can we go and and work on surge capacity? And I think people are
00:03:25.360 getting increasingly frustrated at the idea of of these very well-paid public health bureaucrats and
00:03:31.360 administrators and executives, not the frontline heroes but the people in the back office who were paid to
00:03:37.140 manage all of this, them turning around and saying to the people, no no it's not our job to protect
00:03:42.840 the hospitals it's your kids job to protect the hospitals. And I think now based on these experiences
00:03:48.260 everyone's having with Omicron being a milder variant I just think they're less open to accepting
00:03:54.100 that argument and I think they're right to think that way.