Juno News - November 28, 2021
Let's keep things in perspective when dealing with COVID-19
Episode Stats
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Summary
In this episode, Dr. Bruce Lipton talks about the importance of putting things in perspective when dealing with the Coochlear Osteogenesis Imperfecta virus outbreak in Canada. He talks about how important it is to put things into perspective, and why we need to stop focusing so much on the cases.
Transcript
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I really think we've lost the ability to keep things in perspective here these past 20 months
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dealing with COVID-19 in Canada. And I want to give you one particular example of what I'm
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thinking of right now. So here in Ontario, where I'm based out of, recently there were 900 COVID
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cases announced on Friday. Over 900 cases. And people said, wow, that's so much, because the
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cases had gone down much smaller. Now, keep in mind, we had none other than our chief medical
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officer of health who said, guys, you got to stop fixating on cases. Cases isn't the deal that it
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used to be. Now that you've got most people vaccinated, we're just looking at a whole
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different way of thinking about this. You want to focus on hospitalizations as a marker of severity.
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And when the government publishes their numbers, and then the way their website and their tweets
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are all framed, they've kind of reoriented it. Now that they do focus more on reporting hospitalization
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numbers, the raw case counts, not so exciting. Well, a lot of people, they just have not made
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that mental shift. They didn't take the medical advice, and they are still focused on cases. Many
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of my colleagues in the broader media landscape, very still fixated on the cases. 900 cases, it is so
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much. But is it? Compared to what's going on in terms of human activity? Because there's a whole lot
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of stuff going on right now. We had the Ontario Science Table really obsessed with mobility data.
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So they said, the only way to bring cases down was to bring mobility down. Which is why they became
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obsessed with saying, you can't even go to the ski hill. We got to shut down the ski hill in past
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waves. Because it wasn't so much that they felt that being on a ski hill was something that could
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get you COVID-19. But they just didn't want people leaving the house for any purpose. So get rid of the
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opportunities people would have to leave the house. Here's the thing though. Mobility is just
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through the roof in terms of what human beings are doing. We had a Phil Collins concert the other
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day. That was packed. Tens of thousands of people. We've had many other concerts. There's a Ricky
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Martin concert. I mean, you name it. There's just concerts every second day now in Toronto and in
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other cities in Ontario. Professional sports is going on. I was at a banquet where there were a couple
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hundred people milling about, chatting with each other. Yes, I know there's mask rules, but let's be
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honest, quite a lot of people are not following those mask rules. So when you look at all of that,
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you go 900 cases back when we were in full lockdown. People weren't even coming into contact
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with each other. You go, wow, that's, I guess, a lot. How is this darn thing even spreading when
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human beings aren't interacting? Now, everybody's doing everything. So you got to keep that into
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perspective. And if the hospitalization numbers are still low, as a number of health officials are
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pointing out, okay, well, you look to that data. You make your judgments based on that. But the fact
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that you've got millions of people out and about coming into contact, doing stuff all the time,
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and then you've got people who are picking up a virus where most people do not forget. Most people
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are getting this as an asymptomatic virus. You go, okay, let's just calm down a little bit here
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with all of these concerns. I think one of the challenges is that there are some people out there
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who are some of the voices, the doctors on television or some media people who have a level
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of concern that is greater than the average. So these people, they may not be attending these large
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scale events. So they may not have been able to have that psychological shift themselves.
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Whereas I think if you've actually been to one of these large scale events, you've been to the banquet,
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you're going to the movie theater, you've been to the hockey game or what have you, and you don't get
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some notification, oh, there's some crazy outbreak at that hockey game. Well, then you just get more
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relaxed about things. And I think it's good for people to go out and step out into society more
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and have those experiences and see that it's not a big deal, that it's not causing major problems.
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So again, just an issue of putting things into perspective, numbers into perspective,
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experiences into perspective. And hopefully we can progress in that path a bit more as the weeks