Juno News - November 10, 2020Is the cure worse than the disease？
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Summary
The alarmist rhetoric is heating up from coast to coast, as public health officials and politicians see their rising coronavirus cases every single day hitting record highs, leading them to say we need more restrictions. But is there more to it than that?
Transcript
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the alarmist rhetoric is heating up from coast to coast as a lot of public health officials and
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politicians see their rising coronavirus cases every single day hitting record highs
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leading them to say we need more restrictions yes they're saying it in bc in manitoba ontario
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quebec nova scotia all across the country but one thing that i've noticed that's a little bit
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frustrating is there's a lot they're not saying at these press conferences things that we've been
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talking about these past few months lessons we have learned facts that have presented themselves
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to us that i think should really play a role in how we have this national conversation and also
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the conversations that the officials are having behind closed doors things that should be brought
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up pretty much every day we talk about this stuff well what am i referring to well for starters that
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conversation we've been having the question about is the cure worse than the illness it's become a bit
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of a cliched phrase but what should not be at all discounted is the basic fact that yes the economic
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damage the the social hardships the the mental health challenges alcoholism you name it all those
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things out there that have been documented and discussed i mean you cannot forget about those but
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it seems like yeah we talked about it a little and okay off to the side let's move on to to fretting
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about the daily cases again and i don't think it's that simple in fact i think those issues should
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really be front of mind here's another aspect that we're not talking about as much as we should
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so on tuesday ontario announced 15 new coronavirus deaths that's unfortunate however 12 of those were
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in long-term care facilities now that's also unfortunate and tragic and and those lives certainly matter
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but the fact that they are in long-term care facilities tells us reminds us what we know we've
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been dealing with since the first wave which is we have a very vulnerable population in nursing homes
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and long-term care facilities governments promised to protect them doug ford said an iron ring of
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protection and hold on a second did they not do a good enough job did they fail to deliver let's
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scrutinize that aspect more let's stop wasting time talking about you know that ridiculous conversation
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about whether or not halloween trick-or-treating was unsafe give me a break why did we waste so
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much oxygen talking about that when we should all get in the game to talk about how to protect our
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seniors and what more can we do forget giving over a hundred uh hundred billion dollars to things
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like syrup to prop up people who are in low-risk demographics and low-risk jobs maybe we can put
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more of that money into our health care system into helping our older populations in nursing homes
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long-term care facilities and i think if i could bring up a third thing that we really need to
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keep in mind it's that during the second wave right now things are not as bad as we first feared
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so one of the reasons we locked down so much in march i was advocating for that back in march i said
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there's this crazy thing happening in wuhan looks like people are just dropping like flies left right
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and center in wuhan and uh in italy and iran who knows what's going on we were really worried and
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there were projections that things would be much worse than they are right now thankfully they're
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not as bad and thankfully the medical system in canada is doing a great job with therapeutics
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and figuring out so much more how to deal with this and so on they deserve credit they deserve our praise
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but ontario and it's similar in other provinces ontario has made projections about what their icu rates
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would be like right now they gave the low end they gave the medium they gave the high end
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and guess what we remain lower than the low end so none of these none of these caveats none of these
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points of context i bring up mean that okay we let our guard down and we stopped worrying about
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coronavirus and so forth but maybe they suggest that there's other things we have to factor in
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mind rather than just rising case counts and getting stressed out about them and then talking about
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shutting down all of society maybe we can actually use all of this data and all this information we have