Juno News - May 27, 2021


Researchers shine light on “COVID Misery”


Episode Stats

Length

15 minutes

Words per Minute

201.1603

Word Count

3,086

Sentence Count

134

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 We have been talking for the last, what, 15 months now
00:00:09.500 about the havoc that COVID has unleashed on societies around the world,
00:00:15.000 on communities across Canada, certainly included in that.
00:00:18.320 But missing from the discussion in a lot of cases
00:00:21.340 has been the impact that the response to COVID has had on communities.
00:00:26.900 We've talked about this on this show,
00:00:28.400 but I think certainly in a lot of the public health dialogue,
00:00:31.700 the effect on the economy, the effect on just individual livelihoods
00:00:35.880 has not really been told.
00:00:37.640 But there's been a fantastic project by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute
00:00:41.280 called the COVID Misery Index, which doesn't mince words.
00:00:45.540 It is misery.
00:00:46.320 Let's not deceive ourselves here.
00:00:49.100 But they look at not just what COVID has done,
00:00:51.760 but also what a lot of the government's responses to COVID have done
00:00:56.460 around the world, including in Canada.
00:00:59.020 One of the contributors to this is a Memorial University of Newfoundland
00:01:02.560 professor of health statistics and economics, Professor Richard Ottis.
00:01:06.780 Professor, good to talk to you.
00:01:07.840 Thanks for coming on today.
00:01:09.140 Thanks, Andrew.
00:01:09.720 Thanks for having me.
00:01:11.020 Now, even, by the way, I must say,
00:01:12.460 your title I really like in this,
00:01:14.380 because a lot of the times we get people
00:01:16.360 that are just focusing on the health and not the economics,
00:01:19.280 whereas you've actually, through this, looked at both of these.
00:01:22.880 Obviously, the disease has had an impact,
00:01:24.340 but how governments have responded to the disease
00:01:27.100 has kind of brought differing levels of misery
00:01:29.280 across different provinces and different countries.
00:01:31.940 And, of course, the economic fallout.
00:01:33.660 And one thing that's been pretty remarkable about COVID-19
00:01:37.800 has been, obviously, the huge effect it's had on the economy.
00:01:40.860 Now we sort of seem to be moving towards a recovery,
00:01:43.920 although the recovery is not even.
00:01:46.660 Some provinces bouncing back more quickly than others.
00:01:48.900 And then, finally, looking at the public health responses.
00:01:53.300 Again, every time we go into lockdown,
00:01:55.200 that makes us a little bit more miserable.
00:01:57.400 The speed with which we can get out of this situation,
00:02:00.900 largely through vaccines, or even aggressive testing patterns,
00:02:04.080 again, reduce the misery that's heaped upon us.
00:02:07.040 So, again, what we wanted to do was take a holistic look,
00:02:09.220 or as holistic a look as we could do with the data that's available,
00:02:13.180 and actually see where, of course, in this case,
00:02:15.540 looking across Canadian provinces and seeing which provinces have done reasonably well
00:02:20.420 and which provinces have been a bit more miserable,
00:02:23.180 or quite a bit more miserable in some cases.
00:02:25.340 And I should say, this is not a truly global index.
00:02:28.600 There are 15 countries, all developed nations, that are on this list,
00:02:31.940 which I think emphasizes the point that Canada is not exactly in a position to be proud of here.
00:02:37.380 We have the chart up on the screen there.
00:02:39.180 Canada, 11 of 15 for total misery ranked,
00:02:42.580 a few notches below where the global average is situated on this.
00:02:46.920 Do you find that there are one or two provinces that are really dragging Canada down,
00:02:51.100 or do you find even with the differentiation from one province to another,
00:02:54.640 Canada is generally in that pretty consistently in that realm?
00:02:58.420 No, there's actually been pretty big differences across provinces,
00:03:01.220 and I think the way you experienced COVID-19 is pretty different
00:03:04.880 if you lived in Alberta, Ontario, or Quebec,
00:03:06.760 who are the three, we'll say, most miserable provinces,
00:03:09.160 or experienced the most misery, as compared to Atlantic Canada.
00:03:13.280 So in Atlantic Canada, the situation has been quite different.
00:03:17.800 Case counts have been relatively low.
00:03:19.760 There's been some returns to normalcy, again, with various incidents
00:03:23.760 that are causing a return to lockdowns when necessary, or when deemed necessary.
00:03:29.100 And so I do think that the differences,
00:03:32.240 what you experienced was very different in Alberta
00:03:34.320 compared to what you would have experienced in Prince Edward Island
00:03:37.060 or Nova Scotia.
00:03:39.480 And again, I think that you actually sort of look at the countries,
00:03:42.500 or provinces like Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island,
00:03:45.020 kind of look a lot more like Australia and New Zealand,
00:03:47.540 who've done quite well during the pandemic,
00:03:50.100 as compared to Ontario and Quebec,
00:03:52.200 which kind of look more like the UK,
00:03:54.500 or some of the Western European countries that haven't done quite so well.
00:03:57.700 Is disease misery an apples-to-apples comparison to COVID response misery?
00:04:03.300 Because looking at just Canada and the US, for example, here,
00:04:06.620 the US has a disease misery on this index of more than double what Canada's is,
00:04:11.280 but it has a COVID response misery level that's a little over half of what Canada's is.
00:04:17.840 A lot of people, if they were just looking at death rates, for example,
00:04:20.640 would say that those two aren't even in the ballpark,
00:04:23.000 but the US is actually scoring a bit better overall than Canada.
00:04:26.740 Yeah, and I think that some of that narrative, I think,
00:04:29.500 does come out from early in the pandemic,
00:04:31.100 where clearly the US got it wrong and was very slow to respond.
00:04:36.720 But certainly what the US has done, at least since then,
00:04:39.840 although I think the evidence is suggesting it might be slowing down a little bit,
00:04:42.960 but absolutely knocked it out of the park when it comes to vaccines.
00:04:45.340 I mean, they were one of the first countries to approve vaccines.
00:04:48.560 They very aggressively rolled out vaccines.
00:04:50.480 And of course, in the US and following the US media, as I do,
00:04:55.280 they're very much looking at a pretty normal summer with restrictions being lifted,
00:05:01.480 case counts dropping day over day, death rates declining.
00:05:05.640 So again, I think that, yeah,
00:05:07.080 it's been a pretty miserable experience for the US for sure.
00:05:10.940 But, you know, over the last four or five months,
00:05:13.000 they've really have kind of gotten their act together.
00:05:14.800 And I think when we look at, you know, the sort of the total of what's occurred,
00:05:18.380 you know, the COVID is going to have a longer tail in Canada,
00:05:21.840 because we're going to be longer getting people vaccinated
00:05:24.140 and certainly getting things back to normal.
00:05:26.220 From the get-go, Sweden became somewhat of a political football in this fight.
00:05:32.360 It was held up, I think, by both sides as the example,
00:05:35.600 in one case of what we need to strive towards,
00:05:38.200 and in the other case of what we need to ensure we never replicate.
00:05:41.900 And it's interesting that now looking at this more than a year later,
00:05:45.500 Sweden actually ranks pretty highly on this,
00:05:49.140 just one step below Australia.
00:05:51.420 And I find that interesting, because Australia was very well known
00:05:55.540 for how severe a lot of its restrictions were as far as quarantine.
00:06:00.580 People were stranded abroad, even if they were Australian citizens,
00:06:04.180 whereas Sweden was kind of open season in a lot of ways,
00:06:07.300 yet they both look very similar to each other.
00:06:09.280 What accounts for that?
00:06:10.380 Yeah, I mean, I think, again,
00:06:11.700 the disease sort of manifests itself slightly different in different climates
00:06:14.880 in different parts of the world.
00:06:16.000 And I think, again, the Swedish situation,
00:06:19.260 although I think their response did change over time,
00:06:21.740 I think their initial response, obviously,
00:06:23.240 was to a bit more of a sort of relaxed attitude, shall we say,
00:06:26.760 towards locking down and things like that.
00:06:28.540 Over time, they have sort of changed their approach to it,
00:06:32.420 and they have become a little bit more conventional
00:06:34.480 in terms of what's gone on in other parts of the world.
00:06:37.540 I do think that, essentially, I think, particularly the Swedes,
00:06:43.120 generally, I think, even though they haven't sort of locked them down,
00:06:46.540 they've been able to do things like maintain social distancing,
00:06:50.120 mask wearing, things like that,
00:06:51.640 all of which, or most of which is voluntary there,
00:06:54.560 or a lot of which is voluntary there.
00:06:56.000 Again, they just kind of got on with it
00:06:57.640 and took the restrictions that were necessary.
00:07:00.640 I think in other places, these things had to be mandated by law,
00:07:04.540 and that created some different challenges.
00:07:06.840 And, of course, there's also,
00:07:08.180 even though the legal lockdowns in some places have existed,
00:07:13.420 there's been lots of instances of people sort of skirting the rules
00:07:17.080 or not quite adhering to them.
00:07:19.280 And, of course, the disease doesn't really care
00:07:22.300 whether you sort of observe the rules or not.
00:07:24.160 It just, if it has an opportunity to transmit itself, it does.
00:07:27.080 And, again, so I think that if we could have counted on everybody
00:07:30.360 to sort of do the right thing,
00:07:32.160 I don't think we would have necessarily had to go into lockdowns
00:07:34.600 the way that we did.
00:07:35.320 But, again, I think that wasn't, you know,
00:07:37.140 I think there's pretty big differences
00:07:38.300 from country to country on those issues.
00:07:41.660 When we look at the data,
00:07:42.680 do they tend to show that you either have
00:07:45.420 a really strong disease misery level
00:07:48.420 or a really strong economic and response misery level?
00:07:52.520 Or have there been some different balances we see there?
00:07:56.000 Yeah, I mean, there certainly have, you know,
00:07:57.620 there certainly have been some different balances.
00:07:59.060 You know, when we look across countries,
00:08:00.580 you know, the level of Norway,
00:08:01.520 which comes out on top of our list,
00:08:02.900 where admittedly the disease count was lower
00:08:05.200 than a lot of other countries,
00:08:06.320 but not, you know, not radically dissimilar,
00:08:08.300 but they had very little economic impact.
00:08:10.300 They were able to basically,
00:08:11.340 well, they were able to use
00:08:12.040 their tremendous sovereign wealth fund
00:08:13.820 to kind of keep things going there.
00:08:16.260 And, you know, in other cases,
00:08:17.500 you know, we saw, you know, countries where,
00:08:19.820 you know, for instance, say here,
00:08:21.700 I'm actually in New Zealand.
00:08:24.220 We had very few cases,
00:08:25.440 but actually the economic fallout
00:08:27.020 has been still been pretty large.
00:08:29.180 Again, the tourism industry largely shut down here,
00:08:31.800 you know, pretty big, you know,
00:08:32.700 massive amounts of public borrowing
00:08:34.320 to go in place to largely to keep tourism operators
00:08:38.380 kind of, well, in position
00:08:40.700 or the people who work in them in post
00:08:42.940 for an eventual return to tourism.
00:08:44.980 So I think in some cases, you know,
00:08:46.380 a country, say here, like in New Zealand,
00:08:48.680 where we've had a pretty massive,
00:08:50.140 you know, economic hit,
00:08:51.620 but very little disease.
00:08:53.080 It suggests that, you know,
00:08:53.960 there are some, you know, imbalances in those things.
00:08:57.160 Now, we've certainly seen a lot of discussion in Canada,
00:09:00.620 rightfully so, about the very slow pace
00:09:03.560 at which vaccines have been rolled out.
00:09:05.580 And of course, the four-month interval
00:09:07.100 between the first dose and the second dose in Canada
00:09:09.860 is going to be putting Canada
00:09:11.320 at a tremendously, tremendously lagging level
00:09:14.520 when it comes to the rest of the world
00:09:15.880 and getting their populations vaccinated.
00:09:18.300 How much is a vaccine rollout affecting numbers?
00:09:22.360 Because it does seem like in Canada,
00:09:23.960 there's actually been,
00:09:25.440 I don't know if I would say an uptick in deaths,
00:09:27.600 but an uptick in a death metric
00:09:29.780 that you use called excess deaths.
00:09:32.220 Yep.
00:09:32.680 Well, a couple of things about that.
00:09:34.280 I mean, number one, I mean,
00:09:35.000 I think the vaccines seem to work
00:09:37.000 and they seem to be very effective.
00:09:38.920 And if you look at,
00:09:39.700 I think the UK is the best example of that.
00:09:41.500 I mean, that was a country
00:09:42.080 that was a complete basket case.
00:09:44.800 And now, you know,
00:09:45.620 things are very much getting back to normal.
00:09:46.980 Yeah, they've got like 5,000 people in nightclubs now.
00:09:50.100 Well, exactly.
00:09:51.140 And, you know, sending 10,000 to 15,000 people
00:09:53.160 to football matches and things like that.
00:09:54.860 So again, you know, very much,
00:09:56.160 so the vaccines there have,
00:09:57.360 you know, and it very much been,
00:09:58.420 you know, the path back to normalcy.
00:10:00.200 And certainly that's what we're looking at in the US,
00:10:02.140 where you look at the case counts,
00:10:03.100 which, you know, day over day are,
00:10:04.440 you know, a fraction of what they were a few months ago.
00:10:06.880 So again, I think in that case,
00:10:08.240 you know, the evidence is that the countries
00:10:09.500 that were able to get vaccines to people,
00:10:11.660 you know, have been pretty effective.
00:10:13.220 Still, you know, jury's still out on what's going to happen,
00:10:15.940 whether the sort of the length of your time delay
00:10:18.060 between first and second shot
00:10:19.960 is going to make a big difference or not.
00:10:22.740 You know, so that's what the UK did.
00:10:24.160 And that's what a lot of Canadian provinces
00:10:25.620 are doing as well.
00:10:26.900 Whereas the US is, you know,
00:10:28.040 has opted to try to get second shots into people
00:10:29.860 kind of more, you know,
00:10:31.020 a little bit more closely to the, you know,
00:10:33.020 to the scientific guidelines,
00:10:34.280 which suggests, you know, three to four weeks
00:10:35.620 is the appropriate duration between shots.
00:10:40.040 So, you know, I do think that, you know,
00:10:41.680 that this is something that is going to,
00:10:43.740 you know, that is, that, you know,
00:10:44.800 will have an effect over the longer term.
00:10:46.420 And of course, until people get that second shot,
00:10:48.460 they haven't got that full level of immunity.
00:10:50.600 So again, they're still at, you know,
00:10:51.780 at an elevated level of risk.
00:10:53.800 You know, certainly the evidence suggests
00:10:55.300 the first shot is valuable and useful,
00:10:57.420 but, you know, you get better benefit
00:10:59.100 from that second shot.
00:11:00.560 So I think as soon as people can get those,
00:11:02.340 the, you know, kind of the better we are
00:11:03.580 and the better off we are
00:11:04.760 and the sooner we'll get back to normal.
00:11:07.020 From a longitudinal perspective,
00:11:08.860 I have to ask you, Professor,
00:11:10.060 I mean, you're an economist.
00:11:11.640 How long do you think a lot of this damage
00:11:13.860 is going to last
00:11:15.260 when we look specifically at the economic response
00:11:17.460 and to some extent,
00:11:18.600 the COVID response misery level?
00:11:21.520 Yeah, I mean, I think that the economic impact
00:11:23.600 is going to be felt for a very long time.
00:11:25.320 I mean, you know, you look at the amount of money
00:11:26.600 that governments have borrowed
00:11:27.940 to kind of get through this
00:11:29.300 and not suggesting it's necessarily
00:11:31.020 the wrong thing to do.
00:11:32.060 I often use the analogy that, you know,
00:11:33.680 the roof blew off my house
00:11:35.180 and I had to go get a payday loan
00:11:36.400 to get it fixed.
00:11:37.660 Well, that would be the right thing to do,
00:11:39.040 but it doesn't change the misery involved with it.
00:11:41.480 I think, you know, governments were quite right
00:11:43.120 to, you know, to go out and spend money
00:11:44.620 to, you know, to keep, you know,
00:11:46.040 to keep people from going back to work
00:11:47.600 and potentially to, you know,
00:11:49.000 to keep businesses that will be viable
00:11:50.580 in the future, you know, still going.
00:11:53.160 But, you know, the amount of money
00:11:54.480 that's being spent here
00:11:55.320 is almost that sort of
00:11:56.420 at a World War II type level.
00:11:57.820 I mean, it really is, you know,
00:11:59.660 a massive amount of expenditure
00:12:01.120 that, you know, in Canada,
00:12:02.640 we look at what, you know,
00:12:03.180 the provincial governments,
00:12:03.960 but then also what the federal government
00:12:05.240 has taken on for debt.
00:12:06.800 And it's going to be, you know,
00:12:07.500 it'll be decades, you know,
00:12:08.760 paying that debt off.
00:12:09.720 And unless there is, you know,
00:12:11.020 a terrific amount of economic growth
00:12:12.440 that, you know, that is sustainable
00:12:13.780 for the future,
00:12:14.440 but I don't think that's as terribly likely.
00:12:17.260 So, you know, I think that, you know,
00:12:18.460 this is something that we're going to be paying off.
00:12:19.880 And, you know, it's likely our kids
00:12:21.000 will be still paying off the, you know,
00:12:22.300 the interest on this one
00:12:23.640 sometime in the future.
00:12:25.540 Yeah.
00:12:25.900 And I'd be interested to see
00:12:27.020 the effect on the tax base.
00:12:29.200 I mean, we know certainly
00:12:30.080 a lot of high income earners
00:12:31.280 who have the flexibility
00:12:32.500 of being able to work from home
00:12:33.900 weren't directly affected
00:12:35.460 in the same way as others.
00:12:36.800 But we know tons of businesses,
00:12:38.620 tens of thousands of businesses
00:12:40.160 in Canada have gone under.
00:12:41.500 We've got some projections
00:12:42.920 from organizations
00:12:43.840 like the Canadian Chamber of Commerce
00:12:45.900 that are suggesting
00:12:46.700 tens of thousands of more of those.
00:12:49.620 The effect that has on employment
00:12:51.080 is pretty straightforward.
00:12:53.080 But to really get a sense
00:12:54.920 of how long we're going to be dealing
00:12:56.800 with those repercussions
00:12:57.920 is not really something
00:12:59.280 we can answer yet, is it?
00:13:00.380 No, I mean, although, you know,
00:13:02.240 it's something that, you know,
00:13:03.120 we do see that, you know,
00:13:03.960 the loss in economic activity
00:13:05.380 and the amount of money borrowed.
00:13:06.620 I mean, you know,
00:13:07.320 we're looking at, you know,
00:13:07.900 federal government taking on levels
00:13:09.240 of debt kind of tenfold larger than,
00:13:11.680 you know, you hear of budget deficits
00:13:14.360 of 30 billion or, you know,
00:13:16.120 25, 30 billion as being,
00:13:17.660 you know, pretty high.
00:13:18.400 And, of course, this year,
00:13:18.960 they're looking at, you know,
00:13:19.600 hundreds of, you know,
00:13:20.340 two or three hundred billion dollars.
00:13:22.000 So, again, you're taking on
00:13:23.060 10 years worth of debt
00:13:24.040 in a single year.
00:13:25.780 You know, it's going to take
00:13:27.200 a long time to pay that off.
00:13:28.640 And, you know, I think even,
00:13:30.360 you know, even the cleverest
00:13:31.380 of economists can't really tell you
00:13:32.720 what the economy is going
00:13:33.740 to be doing 10 years from now.
00:13:35.960 But, you know, certainly,
00:13:37.040 you know, it's quite likely
00:13:39.240 that, you know,
00:13:39.640 there will be some hangover
00:13:41.060 in terms of debt repayment,
00:13:42.840 you know, well beyond
00:13:43.800 the next 10 years.
00:13:44.800 So, you know,
00:13:45.200 it is something that's going to be
00:13:46.160 that part of it is going
00:13:47.280 to be with us for a long time.
00:13:48.640 And again, not to say
00:13:49.740 it wasn't necessarily
00:13:50.380 the right thing to do,
00:13:51.360 but when the next crisis comes
00:13:52.820 and the next crisis will come,
00:13:54.780 you know, it does limit
00:13:55.920 our capacity to, you know,
00:13:57.300 to use fiscal tools
00:13:59.280 to try to, you know,
00:14:00.420 to spend our way out of it.
00:14:01.440 So whether it's a financial crisis
00:14:02.700 or if it's a, you know,
00:14:03.620 climate change induced crisis,
00:14:04.980 there's going to be something
00:14:05.960 that's going to come along
00:14:06.820 where governments
00:14:07.340 are going to need to spend money
00:14:08.700 and it's going to be
00:14:09.240 very difficult to, you know,
00:14:11.280 to pay for that.
00:14:13.480 Well, we've all been
00:14:14.520 living the misery.
00:14:15.580 So quantifying the misery
00:14:16.760 seems like the most productive
00:14:17.940 thing we can do
00:14:18.820 in the midst of all of this.
00:14:20.480 You can check out
00:14:21.100 the COVID Misery Index
00:14:22.560 for yourselves
00:14:23.240 over at mcdonaldlaurier.ca.
00:14:26.040 Health Statistician
00:14:27.160 and Economics Professor
00:14:28.660 Richard Ottis
00:14:29.740 from Memorial University
00:14:31.040 of Newfoundland
00:14:31.780 joins me now
00:14:32.440 from New Zealand.
00:14:33.220 Professor, thanks so much
00:14:34.060 for your work on this
00:14:34.760 and for joining me today.
00:14:36.460 Thanks for having me, Andrew.
00:14:37.140 Really appreciate it.
00:14:38.100 Thanks for listening
00:14:38.680 to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:14:40.220 Support the program
00:14:40.940 by donating to True North
00:14:42.160 at www.tnc.news.
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