Juno News - Canada made pandemic playbooks but didn't follow them

00:00:00.000 so i recently read through a bunch of canadian pandemic preparedness reports from different

00:00:10.180 levels of government talking about dealing with well a situation we find ourselves in right now

00:00:14.820 a pandemic and i gotta tell you it was a really frustrating maddening experience to read these

00:00:21.240 documents because i'm flipping through them and i'm looking at the examples and scenarios and i'm

00:00:25.280 going hey this actually doesn't seem like all that bad of a plan it seems a lot smarter a lot better

00:00:31.920 than what we're doing now if only we had stuck with the plans now the main recurring theme through

00:00:39.000 through all of these plans that i read was they anticipate a scenario much worse than what we're

00:00:44.700 dealing with right now in terms of the percentage of canadians who get sick the number of canadians

00:00:49.400 who unfortunately die and they anticipate things being much worse but the measures the restrictions

00:00:54.980 that they say you bring in are a lot less than we've brought in right now to deal with this it's

00:01:01.440 really quite fascinating i'll give you one example when it comes to business closures well they don't

00:01:06.560 say shut down all businesses they say businesses should be told that they may see a lot of people

00:01:11.680 in the workforce who are ill so are home because they're ill or they need to stay home to look after

00:01:16.720 a loved one who is ill so there's going to be business disruption so businesses need to prepare

00:01:21.660 our contingency plans to manage this and they're going to have to come with different come up with

00:01:25.820 different ways of of operating they're going to have to encourage a lot of people to work from home

00:01:29.760 so they basically talk about minimizing disruption but still keeping everything going as much as

00:01:35.600 you can here we go well even if nobody in the workplace is sick you gotta shut the whole thing

00:01:40.680 down right away there's nothing like that in any of these plans one of the other big arguments that

00:01:46.740 we're hearing right now as to why we need all these lockdowns is to preserve hospitals to keep

00:01:51.480 the hospital capacity as low as possible what's interesting one of these plans they anticipate icu

00:01:58.180 capacity during a pandemic of a hundred and seventy percent wow no canadian hospital has come anywhere

00:02:05.500 near that during this pandemic 170 percent icu capacity so what is the response to that what do they

00:02:12.940 say they don't come anywhere near saying well you got to shut all of society down because of this

00:02:17.640 they say well you have to manage expectations you may need to cancel some uh non-urgent surgeries and

00:02:23.800 we're going to have to do a lot to scale up hospital capacity so again they predict a far worse scenario in

00:02:30.300 the hospitals than we're currently seeing but they don't call for the level of interventions we have

00:02:35.720 right now it's a frustrating experience i encourage canadians uh to take a look at any of these documents

00:02:41.040 that they can find to see yeah there actually were plans for this they're pretty good plans and

00:02:46.240 why are we not following it it looks like a lot of people got really alarmed really quickly and just

00:02:53.040 didn't stick with the plans that they put a lot of time into putting together

Juno News - February 08, 2021