Juno News - October 30, 2021The ＂experts＂ fear-mongered about a fourth wave. They were wrong.
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Summary
In this episode, Dr. Kelly reviews a story from September 2019 about how the 4th wave of C.O.V.19 cases in Ontario could be worse than the previous wave, and what to do if that's the case.
Transcript
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I'd like to read you a couple excerpts from a story posted on CBC at the beginning of September
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about where COVID-19 could be heading in Ontario. Here's the headline of this story.
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How bad could the fourth wave get? Buckle up, it could get worse than the third. Wow, that's quite
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something. Buckle up, they're saying. They're using the theatrical language. Although in all fairness
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to them, a lot of media outlets were actually running similar stories at the time. Okay, so the
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story, this is how it begins. Unless we change course, the London region is likely to see a fourth
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wave that is worse than the third, says Western University professor and Ontario Science Table
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member Lauren Cipriano. Okay, interesting story there. Unless we change course. And when she talks
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about London, Ontario, I mean, generally Ontario numbers all across the province, they kind of
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follow in lockstep. So I think it's fair to say this is a prediction for all of Ontario, really,
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not just for London. Continue. Cipriano, an associate professor in Western Schulich School
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of Medicine and Dentistry, as well as the Ivy Business School, used dynamic compartmental modeling
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to project the number of COVID-19 cases in Middlesex, London this fall. Well, there you go. Do not even
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begin to sort of doubt or question this, because this is not the regular modeling from before. This is
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dynamic compartmental modeling. So this is like takes it to a whole new level. This is like total
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trust the science overdrive here in this situation. Okay, the story continues. They ask, it's a Q&A
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format. What exactly have you found? Our projections for the fall indicate that if we stay on the current
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course, we will have more infections in our community than the hospital system will be able
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to handle. It'll be worse than wave three. And then the question is, what are the things we need
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to do to prevent this? And some of these things include reducing unnecessary contacts, capacity
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restraints on indoor environments, and a lot of encouragement around work from home. This story
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posted on September 8th, which, if you go back and look at the data, was the peak of the fourth wave,
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if you can even call it that, which pretty much failed to materialize. So there's a bit of a bit
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of a wave beginning, and then it peaked around the time of this story being published, and then the
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seven-day average has slightly decreased. Now, I'm not someone who does dynamic compartmental modeling,
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so I'm not going to try and tell you where things are going to head next. I'm not saying it's all
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disappearing. Maybe there'll be a rise again. I don't know. But this was the period that this story
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and many others, I'm not trying to pick on this one particular story or this one particular person
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and her predictions, because a number of people made predictions with their modeling, they all said
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around about now, this is when things would just be going absolutely rampant. And they said schools
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being reopened. That would be a driver of it. I remember people saying to me, they said to me,
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they said, hey, Fury, when do you think the schools are going to be shut down again? Just before they
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reopened at the beginning of September. Will we make it to Thanksgiving? Yeah, we've made it to
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Thanksgiving. We've made it beyond. And things are going pretty much just fine. And we have this
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person quoted saying, you've got to reduce contacts. You've got to have capacity constraints.
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Well, people are just increasing contacts. Capacity restraints have been lifted
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all across Ontario. People are going to large sporting events. And guess what?
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The numbers continued to decline. The averages continued to decline. Look, all I'm saying is
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that there is this excessive fear-mongering over the fourth wave. Very serious, top-notch
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science, dynamic compartmental modeling. It was that scientific, that high level. And we had all these
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fear-mongering stories out there. And guess what? It just didn't come to pass. So can we at least
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equal the level of reporting on how this actually did not come to pass? And don't worry,
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folks, for those who internalized all of those anxieties about the fourth wave, can we at least
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do that? Can we at least acknowledge, have a bit of discussion, have a bit of reporting on the fact
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that all of this excessive fear-mongering, thankfully, because of course it is good news,