Juno News - December 20, 2021


Everything is going to be okay during COVID-19


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

206.92018

Word count

604

Sentence count

34


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about how we can speak to others with positivity and optimism during times of fear and anxiety, and offer words of encouragement, encouragement, and encouragement to help people feel less anxious and more confident.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 So I'm running errands, I'm out and about in society, and it got me thinking about the idea
00:00:10.100 of reassuring words and telling people things are going to be okay during COVID-19. You know,
00:00:17.100 I remember back in August of 2020, I was speaking to a parent, a fellow parent, about the issue of
00:00:22.800 schools coming back. And as we were discussing the issue, because schools in Ontario had been
00:00:26.520 closed up until that point. And a lot of people were wondering, well, will there actually be spread
00:00:30.700 in schools in Ontario when they when they get back when they go back into the classroom? And I
00:00:35.320 remember a parent said to me, she said, everything's going to be okay. And it was kind of the first time
00:00:41.800 that somebody had said something like that to me. And I thought, wow, we've had six months of people
00:00:47.140 being extremely concerned and, and basically encouraging others to be fearful. And I found
00:00:52.440 it incredibly refreshing to hear someone just say with confidence, things are going to be all
00:00:57.700 right. And actually, when it comes to Ontario schools, all the data yields that that mother was
00:01:01.220 was correct, that there's really been a negligible amount of COVID-19 spread in the schools and all
00:01:06.440 the hospitalization data and other serious data shows that no, things were not actually difficult
00:01:11.000 with COVID-19 for Ontario parents, for Ontario kids. And that after kids went back to school,
00:01:16.720 pediatricians, that's when they started stepping forward to say that, thankfully, we've learned
00:01:20.360 COVID-19 is less severe than the flu when it comes to kids. Now we're back in a situation where people
00:01:26.620 are feeling very anxious. And why I say, you know, me being out and about running errands,
00:01:30.960 you'll talk to people and what they'll say during these Omicron fears is, oh, hey, you know, how you
00:01:35.340 doing? Hope you have a nice day. Oh, yeah, I'm a little nervous. Are they going to close this? Are they
00:01:39.120 going to close that? What's going to happen to us? A lot of general anxiety in people's chit chat.
00:01:43.860 And instead of saying, oh, yeah, you know, I know what you mean. Cross your fingers. Let's hope things
00:01:48.300 don't shut down. I feel like we have an opportunity to just offer polite, reassuring words to people
00:01:53.100 in our everyday lives. You just say, yeah, you know, I don't know. I think things are going to
00:01:56.700 be okay. And, you know, the data looks good. Things are looking mild. Most people are vaccinated.
00:02:01.560 Hospitalization data looks good. I think things are going to be okay. Just little stuff like that.
00:02:05.560 So that kind of our daily chit chat isn't one that involves cascading fears, which we've seen
00:02:10.660 previously. But instead, we move from a position of general community anxiety, community fears,
00:02:16.420 to one of saying to each other, we got this. We're going to be okay. Things are going to be
00:02:21.260 all right. We have each other's back. In as polite of a way, a respectful exchange, the best that we
00:02:27.180 can do to just say to each other, no, we don't want to look for reasons to promote fears and concerns
00:02:32.860 in our community. We want to look for reasons to promote positivity and say, yeah, we're going to get
00:02:38.500 through this, guys. We don't need to have an attitude that brings about the cascading effects,
00:02:43.900 the sort of over-the-top restrictions, the lockdowns that we've seen in the past. Because I genuinely
00:02:48.460 believe that that attitude does matter and that we want to have a positive attitude through all of this.