Juno News - June 28, 2021


Canada can follow Singapore's approach to COVID-19


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

192.77637

Word count

733

Sentence count

34

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Singapore is going to evolve their response to coronavirus CODI19. They are going to stop quarantining travelers and close contacts of people who test positive, and stop reporting daily case counts. They re going to focus on other mitigating measures to protect the vulnerable.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 A pretty amazing announcement was made in Singapore the other day when it comes to how
00:00:10.340 they're going to evolve their response to COVID-19. They're going to head in a new direction. And it's
00:00:15.860 a direction that Canadians should pay attention to and ask themselves, hmm, why can't we do this
00:00:21.420 here? Little hint, we can. So what's Singapore doing? They are going to learn to live with 0.99
00:00:27.340 COVID. That's what their government ministers are saying. Basically, they say, look, we got to
00:00:30.960 acknowledge that this is an endemic seasonal illness, meaning this thing's not going away.
00:00:35.720 They're saying they're not doing this zero transmission thing anymore, that COVID zero
00:00:39.920 thing that some people really pushed for, which means get to zero cases of this virus, complete
00:00:44.940 elimination, eradication. This is not a virus that you do that for, as more and more experts are
00:00:51.140 saying. This is something that's going to be around in some sense for the rest of our natural
00:00:55.980 lives. So what are you going to do about it? Well, Singapore, like most other countries,
00:00:59.120 has been doing a vaccine rollout. And they say, first of all, you have to embrace the fact that
00:01:02.980 these vaccines have been bringing down hospitalizations and deaths just drastically. So,
00:01:08.300 you know, if there's no progress after vaccines, what was the point of doing the vaccination rollout?
00:01:14.200 They say what they're going to do is basically stop quarantining travelers, stop quarantining close
00:01:19.940 contacts of people who test positive. And here's the interesting one. Stop reporting daily case
00:01:26.160 counts, at least with the fanfare they do. Now, the truth is when it came to influenza,
00:01:30.540 Public Health Agency of Canada does produce data on influenza, seasonal influenza. If you want to talk
00:01:35.820 about the various cases, the hospitalizations and so forth, you're free to do so, which is how,
00:01:41.220 for instance, a lot of pediatricians were able to determine that COVID-19 is actually less severe in
00:01:46.400 kids than the flu is. Because they had something like 1,500, on average, hospitalizations from flu
00:01:52.900 with kids in previous years in Canada. And the COVID hospitalizations are only about 1,300. Although,
00:01:58.960 I should note, story, an item that I actually broke a few weeks ago was that only about a third of those
00:02:04.600 COVID hospitalizations were actually for COVID, people suffering from having the symptoms of
00:02:09.840 coronavirus. In fact, many of them were a kid coming in for, say, a broken arm, and then they test
00:02:14.860 everyone for COVID who comes in. And they found out, oh, this kid had asymptomatic COVID. We didn't
00:02:19.320 know that. Zero symptoms. Not spreading it to anyone. But anyway, they tally him on the hospitalizations
00:02:25.300 list for COVID. Anyway, I digress. But part of the reason I guess I point all that out is once you
00:02:30.460 stop reporting the daily case counts, I mean, that's a thing that stops, I think, driving a lot
00:02:36.080 of the calls for, oh, okay, maybe now we can reopen. Oh, no, we've got to lock up again, and so forth.
00:02:40.400 But if you approach it in a more evolved and balanced way that Singapore is discussing doing,
00:02:46.660 maybe you talk about doing other mitigating measures to protect the vulnerable, for instance,
00:02:51.880 which the vaccine rollout, that was pretty much the part of it anyway, as opposed to this idea that
00:02:56.560 we have to shut down low-risk activities in perpetuity for low-risk individuals. Anyway,
00:03:03.680 lots to see there in the latest announcement for Singapore. Really admirable to see a country sort of
00:03:08.680 take that leap and want to talk about doing things a better way, and also just embracing all of this
00:03:13.900 knowledge that we have learned the past year and a half. One thing that is so frustrating in the way
00:03:18.900 that so many people here in Canada talk about the virus, and not just regular folks, but even doctors
00:03:23.460 on the news and television, radio, and so forth, is they act like we don't have the information about
00:03:28.320 who is most at risk, and who has been most hard hit by this virus, and where it actually transmits,
00:03:34.040 and so forth, but we do. We have reams of information, so let's just embrace that big data
00:03:39.140 and make smarter choices so we can get on with our lives in a responsible fashion, which it seems
00:03:44.800 like Singapore plans to do. Good for them. 1.00