Juno News - October 30, 2021


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


Episode Stats

Length

4 minutes

Words per Minute

177.85182

Word Count

765

Sentence Count

51


Summary


Transcript

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.