Juno News - October 30, 2021


The ＂experts＂ fear-mongered about a fourth wave. They were wrong.

Topics
dynamic compartmental modeling excessive fear-mongering
Mentioned
Lauren Cipriano COVID-19
Albertans want equalization gone. What's next？ The kids deserve a normal Halloween

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

177.85

Word count

765

Sentence count

60


Summary

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

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 I'd like to read you a couple excerpts from a story posted on CBC at the beginning of September
00:00:09.960 about where COVID-19 could be heading in Ontario. Here's the headline of this story.
00:00:15.820 How bad could the fourth wave get? Buckle up, it could get worse than the third. Wow, that's quite
00:00:23.520 something. Buckle up, they're saying. They're using the theatrical language. Although in all fairness
00:00:27.620 to them, a lot of media outlets were actually running similar stories at the time. Okay, so the
00:00:32.260 story, this is how it begins. Unless we change course, the London region is likely to see a fourth
00:00:37.680 wave that is worse than the third, says Western University professor and Ontario Science Table
00:00:42.740 member Lauren Cipriano. Okay, interesting story there. Unless we change course. And when she talks
00:00:49.700 about London, Ontario, I mean, generally Ontario numbers all across the province, they kind of
00:00:53.880 follow in lockstep. So I think it's fair to say this is a prediction for all of Ontario, really,
00:00:57.800 not just for London. Continue. Cipriano, an associate professor in Western Schulich School
00:01:03.500 of Medicine and Dentistry, as well as the Ivy Business School, used dynamic compartmental modeling
00:01:09.280 to project the number of COVID-19 cases in Middlesex, London this fall. Well, there you go. Do not even
00:01:16.340 begin to sort of doubt or question this, because this is not the regular modeling from before. This is
00:01:20.120 dynamic compartmental modeling. So this is like takes it to a whole new level. This is like total
00:01:27.460 trust the science overdrive here in this situation. Okay, the story continues. They ask, it's a Q&A
00:01:33.580 format. What exactly have you found? Our projections for the fall indicate that if we stay on the current
00:01:39.360 course, we will have more infections in our community than the hospital system will be able
00:01:45.080 to handle. It'll be worse than wave three. And then the question is, what are the things we need
00:01:51.540 to do to prevent this? And some of these things include reducing unnecessary contacts, capacity
00:01:58.700 restraints on indoor environments, and a lot of encouragement around work from home. This story
00:02:06.620 posted on September 8th, which, if you go back and look at the data, was the peak of the fourth wave,
00:02:16.280 if you can even call it that, which pretty much failed to materialize. So there's a bit of a bit
00:02:22.720 of a wave beginning, and then it peaked around the time of this story being published, and then the
00:02:28.060 seven-day average has slightly decreased. Now, I'm not someone who does dynamic compartmental modeling,
00:02:33.280 so I'm not going to try and tell you where things are going to head next. I'm not saying it's all
00:02:36.620 disappearing. Maybe there'll be a rise again. I don't know. But this was the period that this story
00:02:41.260 and many others, I'm not trying to pick on this one particular story or this one particular person
00:02:46.220 and her predictions, because a number of people made predictions with their modeling, they all said
00:02:50.980 around about now, this is when things would just be going absolutely rampant. And they said schools
00:02:57.860 being reopened. That would be a driver of it. I remember people saying to me, they said to me,
00:03:02.220 they said, hey, Fury, when do you think the schools are going to be shut down again? Just before they
00:03:05.640 reopened at the beginning of September. Will we make it to Thanksgiving? Yeah, we've made it to
00:03:09.640 Thanksgiving. We've made it beyond. And things are going pretty much just fine. And we have this
00:03:15.300 person quoted saying, you've got to reduce contacts. You've got to have capacity constraints.
00:03:20.240 Well, people are just increasing contacts. Capacity restraints have been lifted
00:03:24.220 all across Ontario. People are going to large sporting events. And guess what?
00:03:30.400 The numbers continued to decline. The averages continued to decline. Look, all I'm saying is
00:03:36.080 that there is this excessive fear-mongering over the fourth wave. Very serious, top-notch
00:03:40.480 science, dynamic compartmental modeling. It was that scientific, that high level. And we had all these
00:03:48.160 fear-mongering stories out there. And guess what? It just didn't come to pass. So can we at least
00:03:54.200 equal the level of reporting on how this actually did not come to pass? And don't worry,
00:04:00.820 folks, for those who internalized all of those anxieties about the fourth wave, can we at least
00:04:05.640 do that? Can we at least acknowledge, have a bit of discussion, have a bit of reporting on the fact
00:04:10.500 that all of this excessive fear-mongering, thankfully, because of course it is good news,
00:04:15.880 did not in fact come to pass.