Juno News - November 27, 2021


Stop the alarmist approach to COVID-19

Topics
alarmist approach to COVID-19
Mentioned
Erin O'Toole Justin Trudeau COVID-19
Politician says only ＂anti-vaxxers＂ oppose mandatory vaccination Let's keep things in perspective when dealing with COVID-19

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

184.18

Word count

551

Sentence count

30

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

There is great excitement in Canada over a new variant of CoD19, a South African variant, and some are calling for a complete shutdown of the border at least to people from those countries affected by this new variant. In this episode, I talk about the lessons we can learn from the past, and why we should be wary of over-exaggerating things.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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 There is currently great excitement in Canada over this new variant, a South African variant
00:00:10.300 of COVID-19, leading for politicians to say we must close the borders, at least to people
00:00:15.680 from those countries and to stop people from going to those countries affected by this
00:00:20.460 new variant.
00:00:21.620 Erin O'Toole, in a statement, calling for some of those tightening of the border measures,
00:00:25.820 saying we must learn from the past lessons of all of this.
00:00:30.580 I think what he means by that is Justin Trudeau did not act quick enough to close the border
00:00:35.260 back in March 2020, and that was folly, and now we must close the border as soon as possible
00:00:39.940 any time we get signs of a new variant.
00:00:43.240 Hold on a second, though.
00:00:44.200 When it comes to learning about lessons from past months of COVID-19, I think some of the
00:00:49.900 lessons we should also learn is that there was a lot of overblown fear-mongering in the
00:00:55.960 past, and that that should inform our reactions now to make sure we don't overhype things,
00:01:00.920 to make sure we don't overreact.
00:01:03.120 Delta variant, for instance, we were told much more serious, deadlier, more severe outcomes
00:01:09.920 from the Delta variant.
00:01:11.000 That has since been proven to be completely incorrect.
00:01:15.340 A lot of people may not know that because all the headlines were the initial fear-mongering
00:01:18.880 about this Delta variant, but it was not proven to be deadlier.
00:01:22.840 It was not proven to be more severe.
00:01:26.260 Likewise, a lot of fear-mongering about a fourth wave throughout parts of Canada.
00:01:30.260 Here in Ontario, the fourth wave, the modelling showed was going to peak in October.
00:01:35.280 It was going to be crazy.
00:01:36.660 Hold on to your hats.
00:01:38.120 That never came to pass, at least not in the way that they predicted it.
00:01:42.440 Excessive fear-mongering.
00:01:43.500 We're going to have to close the schools by Thanksgiving.
00:01:45.860 None of that came to pass.
00:01:47.600 So right now, when it comes to talking about this new variant, well, if you actually read
00:01:52.760 the various news stories out there, there's no clear indication that this is a deadlier
00:01:57.560 variant, that this is a variant that evades vaccines.
00:02:00.860 Yes, you'll have people say, well, we're not sure right now it's possible, so it requires
00:02:04.380 further investigation.
00:02:05.980 Okay, well, let's cross that bridge when we come to it.
00:02:08.880 It's rather alarming to see politicians right away calling for immediate restrictions on our
00:02:14.840 lives.
00:02:15.160 Now, Aaron O'Toole calling for lighter restrictions in terms of just targeting these few countries
00:02:20.360 and then saying people who come in from those countries, we want quarantine, regardless of 1.00
00:02:25.520 vaccination status.
00:02:26.620 He's not calling for a full shutdown of the border.
00:02:28.920 He's not calling to close the stores and so forth.
00:02:31.580 But there can be cascading effects.
00:02:33.900 You bring in one restriction and that encourages people to start calling for other ones.
00:02:38.240 And I think what we need to do, instead of getting stuck in that rut again, stuck in that
00:02:43.200 mindset, is we kind of need to pause and actually take a look at the real facts out there.
00:02:49.700 I think we should be beyond 20 months into this, basically having an alarmist approach to things.
00:02:55.500 Is that too much to ask for?
00:02:56.900 That's really the direction that we've got to head in now in Canada.