Juno News - Are lockdowns the only solution？

00:00:00.000 I really hope our politicians and top public health officials use this holiday break to do

00:00:10.500 just that, to have a break, to pause, to have a timeout, and to step back, reassess things,

00:00:18.100 challenge their assumptions, and go back and ask, what is it you're actually trying to achieve?

00:00:24.180 Because I think for a lot of them, they've maybe lost their perspective. And I feel for them. I

00:00:29.520 genuinely do. I may not agree with every decision that they've been making, but I appreciate that it

00:00:34.160 is frenzied out there for them. Up at the press conferences, almost daily, tons of meetings. Some

00:00:39.440 of them have been pretty honest and open about the fact they're hardly even sleeping. And I think

00:00:43.780 that's probably been a large part of why they no longer have perspective. And I hope that during

00:00:49.620 the holiday season, they, and some of the other individuals out there who are caught up in this

00:00:53.960 manic frenzy, more lockdowns, more restrictions, more panic, that they can pause and reassess things

00:01:00.140 and ask themselves some questions. Some of those questions being, hey, remember what it was like

00:01:05.420 during the first wave when we hardly knew anything about this virus. And we were afraid that anybody

00:01:11.340 could get it at any time and get it seriously and die from it, including our children. Those were scary

00:01:16.520 times. Many of us felt that way. I felt that way back in March. I didn't know what this thing was.

00:01:20.900 Now we've actually answered a lot of those questions. We've learned that thankfully things

00:01:25.840 are not as bad as we first feared they would be. What about other questions around, say,

00:01:30.900 restrictions? There's a number of activities, businesses that have been shut down. And the

00:01:36.100 question is, if you didn't have the data in the first place to tell you they should be shut down,

00:01:40.340 and in many cases they didn't, places like gyms, places like retail outlets, they didn't actually

00:01:46.360 seem to be causing spread. Well, you shut them down. Then two weeks later, three weeks later,

00:01:50.960 and so on, there's still the same number of cases or cases are rising. Well, maybe the shutdowns

00:01:56.580 of those businesses didn't actually have any benefits. So do they still need to stay closed?

00:02:02.880 Can you ask yourselves that? That's an important question to ask. Now that we're talking about

00:02:08.000 vaccines, they're celebrating the fact that the first people in line are getting them. Okay,

00:02:12.480 that's great. They're talking about the timeline to roll out more of the vaccines. Why are they not

00:02:16.760 talking about the timeline for easing the restrictions? Come on, give us a plan about all

00:02:22.260 of that. Do you seriously think that there needs to be 60, 70, 80% of the population vaccinated until

00:02:29.080 you allow retail outlets to open again when we really know that only about 10% of the population is

00:02:35.120 at serious risk of having a severe outcome to this virus? There are a lot of these questions that they

00:02:41.060 need to be asking themselves to reassess. And I think they maybe just haven't had that opportunity

00:02:46.400 since March. And I really hope that they use the Christmas break to sit back and gain some

00:02:51.680 perspective. And hopefully that'll inform their decision-making because the other question they

00:02:56.000 should be asking and we should be all asking is when you look at everything that's being done right

00:03:00.300 now, do you believe that this is the only way it can be done? Or do you believe, oh, just possibly

00:03:05.600 that there could be a better way?

00:03:11.060 Thank you.

00:03:12.060 Thank you.

00:03:14.060 Thank you.

Juno News - December 26, 2020