Juno News - Dr. Tam's 'rocket ship' modelling isn't anything new

00:00:00.000 There's been a lot of conversation in Canada the past few days about the new modeling projections

00:00:09.900 released by Dr. Theresa Tam and Public Health Agency of Canada when it comes to where coronavirus

00:00:15.060 cases are heading in the country, particularly with new variants added into the mix. And a lot

00:00:20.880 of people, regular folks, persons in the media, medical experts, were scratching their heads at

00:00:25.260 these new graphs they released in their latest slide deck because it shows something that's

00:00:29.940 quite a doozy. It shows cases almost immediately skyrocketing, high up like a rocket ship to very

00:00:37.480 large heights of over 20,000 cases a day by the second week of March. So right now we're hovering

00:00:44.020 around 2,000, 2,500 cases a day in Canada, but in just over two weeks' time, apparently it's going

00:00:50.300 to multiply tenfold over. How is that possible? Well, Dr. Tam says the main way to avert that sort

00:00:56.400 of catastrophe. You need to bring in enhanced measures, I guess meaning locking down further

00:01:01.840 than we already are. Wow, that's something. And a lot of these experts asking, well, what were the

00:01:06.900 assumptions underlying this modeling? What were the inputs that were put into it? And conservative

00:01:11.380 MPs actually at a health committee meeting on Friday asked those very questions to a public health

00:01:16.560 agency of Canada scientists, and they couldn't really answer the questions. They just, you know,

00:01:21.700 passed the buck and said, well, we'll table answers with you next week. Well, we'll send in some

00:01:25.460 written submissions to you a week from now. I think one thing that's kind of valuable, though,

00:01:30.620 is going back and looking at some of the previous reports that Teresa Tam has released. One in the

00:01:36.380 middle of November, middle of December, and middle of January. Because what's interesting about those

00:01:40.620 reports, and they have nothing to do with the new variant, is they kind of show a similar thing.

00:01:45.480 Basically, they all show this one scenario where if you relax measures, bam, cases are just going to go

00:01:51.260 crazy through the roof. If you keep doing what you're doing now, there's going to be a steady uptick,

00:01:56.300 a gradual increase of them. But if you further reduce your contacts, meaning people just don't

00:02:01.720 see each other anymore, you leave the house even less than you are, and bring in more measures,

00:02:06.280 more lockdowns, that's the only way cases will decline. That's kind of interesting, because when

00:02:11.340 she brought that out in November, and then says in a few weeks cases are going to start to build,

00:02:15.300 that graph actually kind of looks like it's accurate. Because as we know, there was a

00:02:20.100 building line that happened throughout December, it continued to grow. But then it peaked around

00:02:25.620 January 8. And if you go back to her December report, her January report, she does not predict

00:02:30.580 that those drops are going to happen. So it's very instructive to look at this new modeling with the

00:02:36.920 new variant involved and realize the similarities between the previous modeling. Basically always

00:02:43.200 saying, look, if you see more people, cases are going to skyrocket. If you bring in more measures,

00:02:48.520 they're going to decrease. It doesn't seem like they're factoring many other variables in, like

00:02:53.340 explaining what's going on all across Canada right now in different provinces and in different parts

00:02:58.360 of the United States, where we have seen since the first week of January, a dramatic decline in the

00:03:04.240 cases that are currently happening. Now, I know a lot of officials would like to say, well, the reason

00:03:08.220 that those cases have been declining is because we brought in lockdowns. For instance, Ontario started a

00:03:12.880 lockdown around about Christmas time. And they say that is why you're seeing that rapid decline. But that

00:03:18.540 rapid decline has also been occurring in U.S. jurisdictions that do not have lockdowns in place. And it's

00:03:23.400 almost an exactly identical one in terms of the way the curve goes, when it started, and so forth. So kind of

00:03:29.640 instructive to see, well, Dr. Theresa Tam putting out some scary figures just last week, but it's not the first

00:03:36.580 time. She's been doing it for several months. And while the results are quite a mixed bag.

Juno News - February 22, 2021