Juno News - December 13, 2021


Majority of Canadians are ready to live with COVID-19

Topics
public opinion flipping around
Mentioned
COVID-19 Omicron
Trudeau government wants to mandate electrical vehicle sales Canada’s insignificant role on the world stage

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

168.19

Word count

448

Sentence count

31


Summary

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

A new poll out from Maru shows that two-thirds of Canadians now are saying, "uh-uh, we re done with this." COID19 is a real thing that we re concerned about, but we re ready to get on with our lives.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Throughout the course of the pandemic, I've had the opportunity to speak with and learn from some
00:00:10.440 top-notch medical voices who have pretty much maintained throughout that a better way is
00:00:15.580 possible, that we don't need broad-based lockdowns, that we can manage COVID-19 while still getting on
00:00:21.940 with our lives. Now, unfortunately, the general public has largely not been sharing that perspective
00:00:27.980 for a variety of reasons. Polling numbers indicated that always about two-thirds of Canadians were fine
00:00:34.760 with the lockdowns that were implemented throughout different waves here in Canada, but new polling
00:00:40.860 numbers show that opinion is changing. Things have been turned on its head. A new poll out from Maru
00:00:47.600 shows that two-thirds of Canadians now are saying, uh-uh, we're done with this. COVID-19 is a real
00:00:54.500 thing that, sure, we're concerned about, but we're ready to get on with our lives. It's quite
00:00:59.720 interesting to break down some of these polling results. They ask Canadians when it comes to
00:01:04.620 Omicron fears, hey, is Omicron meaning that your workplace is changing its rules, changing the way
00:01:10.680 it's doing things? Three-quarters of respondents say, uh-uh, that's not happening. They say, are Omicron
00:01:16.800 fears? Are they changing your travel plans, your daily plans in any way? Uh-uh. Three-quarters of people
00:01:22.420 say, that's not the case. So we see that people are just wanting to move forward with things. Then
00:01:28.660 there's a question where they ask, do you agree with the statement that vaccines and or people's
00:01:32.880 natural immunity will help us get through this latest phase? The majority of people say yes. Now, other
00:01:39.140 questions say, are you concerned about Omicron? And 50% of people say, yeah, I'm quite concerned about
00:01:43.900 it. They also ask, do you think Omicron is going to be more transmissible and deadlier? And what's
00:01:49.780 interesting is a lot of people say, yes, we believe it will be deadlier. Even though right
00:01:54.580 now reports on the ground, everything we're hearing from South Africa and other jurisdictions
00:01:58.420 indicates it's not deadlier. But it's kind of interesting that even based on the assumption
00:02:03.900 that Omicron is deadlier, the majority of people still say, look, let's get on with our lives. This
00:02:10.840 doesn't mean they're in denial of any reality that's going on right now. It just means they're looking
00:02:15.620 around. They're saying it's been two years. We've learned a lot. There's a lot of new directions
00:02:19.840 we're headed in and let's productively move forward with our lives. Public opinion flipping
00:02:25.820 around. It's changing. The majority of people no longer support broad-based public health measures.
00:02:32.140 It'll be really interesting to see governments listen to this, reflect, internalize, and hopefully
00:02:37.060 we finally proceed towards that better way.