Juno News - November 10, 2020


Is the cure worse than the disease？


Episode Stats

Length

4 minutes

Words per Minute

183.00449

Word Count

776

Sentence Count

1


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 the alarmist rhetoric is heating up from coast to coast as a lot of public health officials and
00:00:10.540 politicians see their rising coronavirus cases every single day hitting record highs
00:00:16.360 leading them to say we need more restrictions yes they're saying it in bc in manitoba ontario
00:00:24.000 quebec nova scotia all across the country but one thing that i've noticed that's a little bit
00:00:29.980 frustrating is there's a lot they're not saying at these press conferences things that we've been
00:00:35.120 talking about these past few months lessons we have learned facts that have presented themselves
00:00:39.880 to us that i think should really play a role in how we have this national conversation and also
00:00:44.720 the conversations that the officials are having behind closed doors things that should be brought
00:00:49.740 up pretty much every day we talk about this stuff well what am i referring to well for starters that
00:00:54.640 conversation we've been having the question about is the cure worse than the illness it's become a bit
00:01:00.640 of a cliched phrase but what should not be at all discounted is the basic fact that yes the economic
00:01:06.780 damage the the social hardships the the mental health challenges alcoholism you name it all those
00:01:13.780 things out there that have been documented and discussed i mean you cannot forget about those but
00:01:18.700 it seems like yeah we talked about it a little and okay off to the side let's move on to to fretting
00:01:23.200 about the daily cases again and i don't think it's that simple in fact i think those issues should
00:01:27.520 really be front of mind here's another aspect that we're not talking about as much as we should
00:01:33.280 so on tuesday ontario announced 15 new coronavirus deaths that's unfortunate however 12 of those were
00:01:41.800 in long-term care facilities now that's also unfortunate and tragic and and those lives certainly matter
00:01:47.540 but the fact that they are in long-term care facilities tells us reminds us what we know we've
00:01:53.380 been dealing with since the first wave which is we have a very vulnerable population in nursing homes
00:01:58.660 and long-term care facilities governments promised to protect them doug ford said an iron ring of
00:02:03.820 protection and hold on a second did they not do a good enough job did they fail to deliver let's
00:02:09.580 scrutinize that aspect more let's stop wasting time talking about you know that ridiculous conversation
00:02:14.580 about whether or not halloween trick-or-treating was unsafe give me a break why did we waste so
00:02:20.660 much oxygen talking about that when we should all get in the game to talk about how to protect our
00:02:26.180 seniors and what more can we do forget giving over a hundred uh hundred billion dollars to things
00:02:32.500 like syrup to prop up people who are in low-risk demographics and low-risk jobs maybe we can put
00:02:38.260 more of that money into our health care system into helping our older populations in nursing homes
00:02:43.540 long-term care facilities and i think if i could bring up a third thing that we really need to
00:02:48.340 keep in mind it's that during the second wave right now things are not as bad as we first feared
00:02:55.220 so one of the reasons we locked down so much in march i was advocating for that back in march i said
00:02:59.780 there's this crazy thing happening in wuhan looks like people are just dropping like flies left right
00:03:04.420 and center in wuhan and uh in italy and iran who knows what's going on we were really worried and
00:03:10.500 there were projections that things would be much worse than they are right now thankfully they're
00:03:16.660 not as bad and thankfully the medical system in canada is doing a great job with therapeutics
00:03:22.260 and figuring out so much more how to deal with this and so on they deserve credit they deserve our praise
00:03:28.420 but ontario and it's similar in other provinces ontario has made projections about what their icu rates
00:03:34.180 would be like right now they gave the low end they gave the medium they gave the high end
00:03:38.900 and guess what we remain lower than the low end so none of these none of these caveats none of these
00:03:45.380 points of context i bring up mean that okay we let our guard down and we stopped worrying about
00:03:50.260 coronavirus and so forth but maybe they suggest that there's other things we have to factor in
00:03:55.940 mind rather than just rising case counts and getting stressed out about them and then talking about
00:04:00.740 shutting down all of society maybe we can actually use all of this data and all this information we have
00:04:06.980 to make smarter policy choices