Juno News - February 02, 2020


Canada's soft approach to the coronavirus

Mentioned
Michael Kovrig Michael Spavor Eileen Davila Patty Hadju John Tory
The renewed effort to get Bill C-16 modified or repealed Climate alarmists are all hypocrites

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

186.53

Word count

1,102

Sentence count

44

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The coronavirus outbreak in China continues to grow, and so does the number of confirmed cases, raising concerns about the politicization of public health officials and their handling of this global health crisis. Why are we so worried about it? And why are we banning flights from China?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 We're at a very interesting time right now when it comes to the coverage and conversation around
00:00:09.120 the coronavirus. As we speak the numbers of infected cases in Wuhan and the Hubei province
00:00:14.920 and all across China are increasing. Tragically so is the death toll. Now the number of cases in
00:00:20.880 other countries in western countries is increasing but ever so slightly and the Canadian increase is
00:00:26.580 very small. The number of suspected cases is actually decreasing. Most of the tested cases
00:00:32.960 roll over and end up being negative that the people they thought may have it actually just
00:00:36.800 end up having the regular flu or or something else. So that's good news I guess from that perspective
00:00:42.300 but there's still a lot of alarm after the World Health Organization called this a global health
00:00:47.740 crisis that Canada is perhaps not doing enough and doing things a little differently than other
00:00:54.680 countries and you got to step back and you've got to wonder why. There are some concerns about the
00:01:00.480 politicization of public health officials. I remember I first thought this back about eight
00:01:05.220 years or so ago when there were public health officials in cities all across Canada and also
00:01:09.740 in the United States who all jumped on this bandwagon advocating for a pop ban, a soda ban or some sort of
00:01:15.480 tax. There are different variations in different cities but you get the idea and I thought hold on a
00:01:20.660 second. Even if you think these bans are a good idea why are top-notch public health officials who
00:01:26.380 we should be trusting to say nothing but advocating to you know keep our water and beaches clean and all
00:01:31.800 that kind of stuff and talking about immunization they're basically advocating for public policy in a
00:01:38.360 way that it can become a partisan battle. This is not good to see them in this political realm.
00:01:42.800 Likewise it was not too comforting to see Toronto's chief medical officer Dr. Eileen Davila
00:01:49.100 attending a press conference alongside Toronto Mayor John Tory where he was not talking about the
00:01:54.440 nuts and bolts and basic facts of the coronavirus but condemning hate and racism and misinformation
00:02:00.540 and discrimination that was all happening. Now when he made that press conference that was
00:02:05.200 back on Wednesday that stuff just wasn't really happening and when one of my colleagues asked him to
00:02:11.180 give an example of these racist incidents and to back up his claim that people were calling for the
00:02:17.140 Chinese Canadian community to be quarantined. I mean that is quite something to say he refused to answer
00:02:23.480 the question. I don't know what was going on at this press conference. It seemed to be some sort of
00:02:27.820 well let's get in front of racism in case it happens or I don't know were they talking about the fact that 1.00
00:02:32.680 two or three idiots on Twitter were saying racist things as two or three idiots on Twitter will always 1.00
00:02:37.560 do. I just don't know. I think it was some sort of political correctness well just in case there is 1.00
00:02:43.280 intolerance let's sort of preemptively denounce it kind of thing. Politicians like to do that sort of
00:02:49.020 stuff. Public health officials though should not be doing that stuff. They should not be doing the
00:02:54.540 sorts of things that politicians like to do. They should be just the facts man keeping it plain
00:03:00.080 straightforward. We didn't see that and I think that troublingly compromised the integrity of Canada's
00:03:05.600 public health officials at the very time when we need to trust them the most. Now there is another
00:03:11.060 politicized angle going on here or it could be a politicized angle. Conversations about bringing
00:03:16.880 Canadians back from Wuhan on different chartered planes because of course flights are restricted
00:03:22.120 but different countries can say we want to get our citizens out. Now there are about 250 or so
00:03:27.860 Canadians in Wuhan and 180, 190 of them or so have said okay we want to come back to Canada. Now there
00:03:34.880 are a number of other countries who are doing this and they are quarantining their people for two weeks.
00:03:40.200 That seems to be the protocol that other sort of developed nations like-minded countries to Canada
00:03:46.300 is undertaking but at the time of me recording this right now and I know this stuff changes pretty
00:03:51.200 much every hour all the facts and figures and so forth. Canada was saying no we are not actually
00:03:57.080 going to be quarantining it and and public health minister Patty Hadji just said if they show symptoms
00:04:02.420 we'll quarantine them. Why are we so out of step with other countries? And then there is the banning of the
00:04:09.880 flights. There are other countries that the country itself, the federal government has been banning
00:04:15.480 flights from Wuhan or from China entirely. Here in Canada we've had Air Canada and I guess now other
00:04:21.400 carriers, they have made the choice to pull back their flights but not the government and I wonder why.
00:04:28.300 Now we know Canada has a lot of problems with China right now that put at risk various trade measures and of course
00:04:33.800 put at risk the lives and safety of people like Michael Kovorg and Michael Spavor. Could we perhaps
00:04:39.560 be soft on our response to China and the coronavirus because of this? Because of our other relationship
00:04:46.220 with China? That would be very worrisome to see. That would be the further politicization of this
00:04:50.660 incredible health issue. But I'm left wondering why is it that we are so out of step with what other
00:04:56.980 countries are doing, so reticent to do it? And why are we haranguing and hectoring our citizens about
00:05:01.900 misinformation and disinformation and so forth without evidence? I don't know what they mean.
00:05:07.200 Are there people online and various online accounts that are saying completely ridiculous things that
00:05:11.980 we should not follow? Yes. But there are also epidemiologists and health experts from other
00:05:16.640 countries who are advising things be done differently than Canada is doing them. So do we trust those health
00:05:23.480 officials? We're told trust the experts. But then there are experts advocating for things
00:05:28.020 differently than Canadian health officials are asking to be done. Which is the misinformation
00:05:33.920 and the disinformation? There's a lot of confusion out there right now and I think that's only natural
00:05:40.300 given how there are so many moving parts and variables. And I just think Canadian politicians and
00:05:45.640 public health officials could be conducting themselves a little bit better right now to sort of calm the
00:05:51.180 uncertainty and to get everybody on the same page.