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

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

In this episode, Dr. Kelly talks about the growing number of cases of the Omicron variant of the HIV virus in Canada, and how this is changing the way we think about government restrictions on access to the internet, access to information, and access to care.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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.