Juno News - Researchers shine light on “COVID Misery”

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 0.63

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.

00:14:50.480 www.tnc.news.com

Juno News - May 27, 2021

Researchers shine light on “COVID Misery”

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