Juno News - November 03, 2020


It's time to learn to live with COVID-19

Mentioned
Vera Etches Donald Trump
Canadians aren't taking the government seriously Should Canadians be skeptical of the polls？

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

180.86

Word count

661

Sentence count

37


Summary

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

Dr. Vera Etches, the Chief Medical Officer for Ottawa, stepped forward to say it's time for a new approach to fighting coronavirus. She gave a presentation to the Board of Health Committee in Ottawa saying, "Yes, we need to do things differently."

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.560 Looks like we could be seeing a major shift in how medical officers of health across Canada
00:00:10.640 respond to the coronavirus pandemic and the responses that they advocate we all take.
00:00:16.160 This coming after a watershed moment as Dr. Vera Etches, whose chief medical officer for Ottawa,
00:00:22.960 our nation's capital, stepped forward to say it's time for a new approach. She gave a presentation
00:00:29.680 to the Board of Health Committee in Ottawa saying, yes, we need to do things differently. We need to
00:00:35.200 learn to live with coronavirus, to get on with our lives in some way with care, she said. Very
00:00:42.000 important that we do everything we can to stop transmission, that we protect vulnerable groups.
00:00:47.280 She wants to see more approaches to combating coronavirus, but advocates for the fact that
00:00:52.640 we've got to start reopening different aspects of our lives, of the economy, like we did with
00:00:58.240 the school system, doing it responsibly, but in a way that allows people to get back to some sense
00:01:04.000 of normalcy. She was referencing mental health challenges, unemployment, a whole host of other
00:01:09.680 issues that society is grappling with, acknowledging we may be dealing with this virus for quite some
00:01:14.960 time, so the current way we're doing it, well, we're going to have to learn to pivot. It was really
00:01:20.480 great to see one medical officer step forward and say that, because rather sadly, perspectives on
00:01:26.240 coronavirus have become something of a culture wars, definitely with political markers. You know,
00:01:31.520 I've made comments about my support for, yes, doing things a better way, a different way, and people
00:01:36.560 just dismissively write to you and say, oh, that's Trumpian. Is it? I don't know, maybe. I guess Donald
00:01:41.600 Trump says some things like that. I'm not taking all my views from him. I'm looking at the Ontario data,
00:01:47.120 the Canada data, and numbers. So the whole idea that we would dismiss an entire conversation, or one
00:01:54.000 half of a conversation because Donald Trump or someone like that happens to advocate for something
00:01:59.360 similar, that is a problem. But clearly, there's great cultural pressure to take one side or the
00:02:05.280 other, depending on what your political views are. And I think it took a remarkable amount of bravery
00:02:10.080 on the part of Dr. Vera Etches to say, you know what, I think we do need to look at doing things
00:02:15.520 differently. You know, folks, every day I wake up and sometimes I'll think to myself, oh, great,
00:02:19.280 I'm going to the gym right now. And they go, oh yeah, I can't because gyms are currently not open
00:02:23.760 in Ontario. Or let's do this or that with the kids. Ah, darn, we can't. Now, I agree. I support
00:02:29.600 some of the conditions that we live under, not the gym thing. I think they should be reopened.
00:02:33.760 Some of them I do support, but I still think no matter what, every day that we wake up, regular folks
00:02:39.360 or chief medical officers, you need to be asking yourself, is this right? You need to challenge your
00:02:44.960 assumptions. You need to be rethinking every single day, are we doing things the right way? Because
00:02:49.920 we are doing such incredible things, changes, differences to the daily lives of many millions
00:02:56.320 of people that you can't just let it become a state of normalcy. You can't just accept the status quo.
00:03:02.000 So hats off to Dr. Vera Etches for saying, I want to start to do things differently. Who knows what
00:03:07.120 details she's going to present and that she's going to work out with the mayor and she'll probably have to
00:03:11.360 speak to the province about it as well. But I think it's really important that we are seeing one medical
00:03:16.480 officer say, yes, let's just pause. Let's talk about doing things differently. And hopefully
00:03:21.600 she will be a trailblazer leading us out of this very troubling chapter of our lives that we are all in
00:03:27.040 right now.