Some Canadians are refusing to learn to live with COVID
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Summary
In this episode, I speak with Dr. Dr. Kelly Holmes, the Chief Medical Officer of Health for the Province of Ontario, about the evolving nature of covid19 and why we need to stop obsessing so much about the raw case numbers.
Transcript
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here in canada we've got public health officials from various different provinces saying it's time
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to learn to live with covid british columbia alberta even the chief medical officer of health
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for ontario which is one of the more lockdown restrictive provinces or at least has been
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for the past year and a half even their new chief medical officer dr kieran moore saying
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we gotta learn to live with covid this isn't going away it's an endemic illness and part of that part
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of that advice from these medical officers has been we've got to stop obsessing over the raw case
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counts because as vaccination rates increase as natural immunity from prior infection increases
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what it means to test positive for covid19 means something very different it means less substantively
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than it did in the past in terms of what that denotes for serious outcomes and hospitalizations
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icu beds and deaths and so on and so forth which is why we see a different discussion and even a
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different way of reporting the numbers from different officials in all of these provinces
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for example i'll give you one little example christine elliott she's the health minister of
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ontario and every day at a certain time she tweets out well she used to tweet out the new daily cases
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for ontario now she does it a little differently she isn't so focused on cases that's not the first
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thing her little twitter thread of latest developments in ontario about covid is about
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talking more about vaccination rates and then statistics around hospitalizations and then gets
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to the case count but is acknowledging that okay the case counts just aren't that big of a deal
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but i noticed that there are a lot of people across canada who just still can't internalize that
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message from our public health officials that cases they just ain't what they used to be they
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don't matter as much as they used to matter so when you hear people say oh we've got these projections
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about covid cases let's talk about modeling with cases and so forth okay do what you want with your
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modeling but but why why should we pay such great attention well why should it matter so much please
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don't tell me oh we gotta shut this down we gotta shut that down because of rising cases no it doesn't
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work that way anymore and it's kind of frustrating to see that there are so many people including
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some people in the medical community who are just so resistant to evolving the way we look at covid 19
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they are resistant to acknowledging that this is evolving into being an endemic illness one that
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can be quite serious for a number of people so needs to be taken seriously in some respects absolutely
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but this basic argument and i always had problems with this basic argument whenever it would occur but
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the one from from previous incarnations where you said cases are up society must lock down i had a
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lot of problems with the way we had that conversation in the past but now like moving forward that it's
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not even a serious conversation whatever you thought about things in the past that moving forward well
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that's that's not what the medical officers of health they're saying that's just junk science and yet
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there are some people who are so seized upon it they just still don't want to evolve into a new
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response to dealing with those numbers and it's really integral i think moving into the fall
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that all of those officials bc alberta ontario elsewhere who are saying it's about learning to
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live with covid it's about learning that the raw case numbers let's please stop obsessing over that
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well that's what they're saying and that's that's the program everybody's got to get with now