Juno News - November 28, 2021


Let's keep things in perspective when dealing with COVID-19


Episode Stats

Length

3 minutes

Words per Minute

201.20271

Word Count

803

Sentence Count

53


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 I really think we've lost the ability to keep things in perspective here these past 20 months
00:00:11.420 dealing with COVID-19 in Canada. And I want to give you one particular example of what I'm
00:00:16.540 thinking of right now. So here in Ontario, where I'm based out of, recently there were 900 COVID
00:00:22.220 cases announced on Friday. Over 900 cases. And people said, wow, that's so much, because the
00:00:27.480 cases had gone down much smaller. Now, keep in mind, we had none other than our chief medical
00:00:31.980 officer of health who said, guys, you got to stop fixating on cases. Cases isn't the deal that it
00:00:37.700 used to be. Now that you've got most people vaccinated, we're just looking at a whole
00:00:42.260 different way of thinking about this. You want to focus on hospitalizations as a marker of severity.
00:00:47.860 And when the government publishes their numbers, and then the way their website and their tweets
00:00:51.540 are all framed, they've kind of reoriented it. Now that they do focus more on reporting hospitalization
00:00:56.500 numbers, the raw case counts, not so exciting. Well, a lot of people, they just have not made
00:01:01.640 that mental shift. They didn't take the medical advice, and they are still focused on cases. Many
00:01:06.680 of my colleagues in the broader media landscape, very still fixated on the cases. 900 cases, it is so
00:01:12.900 much. But is it? Compared to what's going on in terms of human activity? Because there's a whole lot
00:01:20.240 of stuff going on right now. We had the Ontario Science Table really obsessed with mobility data.
00:01:25.700 So they said, the only way to bring cases down was to bring mobility down. Which is why they became
00:01:31.880 obsessed with saying, you can't even go to the ski hill. We got to shut down the ski hill in past
00:01:37.440 waves. Because it wasn't so much that they felt that being on a ski hill was something that could
00:01:42.980 get you COVID-19. But they just didn't want people leaving the house for any purpose. So get rid of the
00:01:48.380 opportunities people would have to leave the house. Here's the thing though. Mobility is just
00:01:53.840 through the roof in terms of what human beings are doing. We had a Phil Collins concert the other
00:01:58.900 day. That was packed. Tens of thousands of people. We've had many other concerts. There's a Ricky
00:02:02.640 Martin concert. I mean, you name it. There's just concerts every second day now in Toronto and in
00:02:07.360 other cities in Ontario. Professional sports is going on. I was at a banquet where there were a couple
00:02:12.580 hundred people milling about, chatting with each other. Yes, I know there's mask rules, but let's be
00:02:17.740 honest, quite a lot of people are not following those mask rules. So when you look at all of that,
00:02:22.020 you go 900 cases back when we were in full lockdown. People weren't even coming into contact
00:02:27.180 with each other. You go, wow, that's, I guess, a lot. How is this darn thing even spreading when
00:02:31.060 human beings aren't interacting? Now, everybody's doing everything. So you got to keep that into
00:02:36.820 perspective. And if the hospitalization numbers are still low, as a number of health officials are
00:02:42.400 pointing out, okay, well, you look to that data. You make your judgments based on that. But the fact
00:02:46.640 that you've got millions of people out and about coming into contact, doing stuff all the time,
00:02:50.920 and then you've got people who are picking up a virus where most people do not forget. Most people
00:02:55.300 are getting this as an asymptomatic virus. You go, okay, let's just calm down a little bit here
00:03:01.640 with all of these concerns. I think one of the challenges is that there are some people out there
00:03:06.720 who are some of the voices, the doctors on television or some media people who have a level
00:03:12.500 of concern that is greater than the average. So these people, they may not be attending these large
00:03:18.220 scale events. So they may not have been able to have that psychological shift themselves.
00:03:23.480 Whereas I think if you've actually been to one of these large scale events, you've been to the banquet,
00:03:28.340 you're going to the movie theater, you've been to the hockey game or what have you, and you don't get
00:03:32.120 some notification, oh, there's some crazy outbreak at that hockey game. Well, then you just get more
00:03:36.820 relaxed about things. And I think it's good for people to go out and step out into society more
00:03:40.960 and have those experiences and see that it's not a big deal, that it's not causing major problems.
00:03:46.940 So again, just an issue of putting things into perspective, numbers into perspective,
00:03:52.220 experiences into perspective. And hopefully we can progress in that path a bit more as the weeks
00:03:58.600 and months proceed.