Juno News - November 17, 2020


The government failed to protect the vulnerable

Topics
government failure
Mentioned
Doug Ford
Media freedom conference’s first session is closed to the media The provinces continue enforcing more lockdown measures

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

194.05

Word count

756

Sentence count

44


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about the lack of government action to fight the coronavirus pandemic, and why we should be focusing on the areas of the population that are most at risk of catching the virus.

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 When it comes to battling the pandemic in Canada, I hope we can all agree on the fact that what we
00:00:09.840 should be doing is actually going after the trouble spots, dealing with the actual problems,
00:00:15.480 the people who are going to be hard hit by the pandemic, by the coronavirus, the people who are
00:00:19.680 most at risk and who could tragically die of COVID-19. We're learning more and more about
00:00:25.360 how this virus works. The first wave, awful stuff, and we had no clue what was going on. Medical
00:00:30.160 experts said, we don't know how to treat this stuff. But I've had the privilege of speaking
00:00:33.600 with a number of doctors who are actually on the front lines and they've been treating coronavirus
00:00:37.120 patients. And they say, more or less, well, we got this now. We figured out how things work. We
00:00:42.560 figured out how to treat patients. Yes, it's true questions about long COVID and obviously these
00:00:47.640 vaccines. Those questions are not fully answered. But in terms of what steroids to give people and
00:00:52.560 when and how much and so forth, well, they've largely answered a lot of those questions and
00:00:57.120 things are going pretty well. People are coming into the hospital, but more of them are leaving.
00:01:00.960 It is not the death sentence that it used to be. So the people who are actually treating coronavirus
00:01:06.240 patients, they have a lot of positive stories to tell. That news isn't getting out there as much as
00:01:12.000 it should. But the one thing those doctors do caution is that long-term care homes, nursing homes,
00:01:18.000 the elderly, they still are very much at risk. They are our most vulnerable. Now we've known that
00:01:24.080 though for quite some time. We're just learning it even more now. And the question is, why didn't
00:01:29.360 government do more to prevent what we're seeing in the second wave right now? And the majority
00:01:34.960 of those deaths are people who are much older, over 70, over 80 people in long-term care in nursing
00:01:40.640 homes. One example, back in March in Ontario, at the end of March, they announced a $17 billion
00:01:46.320 COVID package. Okay, great. $17 billion to address the problem, right? Well, hold on a second though.
00:01:52.480 Most of that again was economic support. Only just over $3 billion of that went into healthcare. And of
00:01:58.240 that $3 billion, just about $250 million of it went into long-term care facilities. And you say,
00:02:04.480 okay, Fury, well that was early days. That was March. We learned a bit more. What did they announce
00:02:07.520 in April, May, June, July, August, and so forth? Not much, not at all. One would think there would be
00:02:13.280 historic investments in healthcare all across the country. It is true that there were some field
00:02:18.480 hospitals that were created by various different regional health hubs to deal with an overflow of
00:02:24.080 patients, things that they built in parking lots and so forth. A few of them are already online,
00:02:28.320 and for the most part, actually haven't been able to, haven't needed to be used yet. But what about
00:02:32.960 when it comes to propping up nursing homes, supporting them, bringing in more goods, material,
00:02:36.800 and so forth? Well, there's been a few little investments here and there, and actually in November,
00:02:40.960 they announced about $50 million to train an extra over 3,000 people to work in these facilities.
00:02:47.680 But hold on, they're just announcing that now in November, and there really wasn't any comparable
00:02:52.160 announcement prior to that in, oh, I don't know, the summer when we actually had a lot of time to
00:02:56.400 hunker down and prepare for the second wave and prepared where it really mattered in terms of actually
00:03:02.560 addressing the problem. Instead, you hear Ontario Premier Doug Ford and others bleeding on about,
00:03:06.800 oh, there's not going to be a Christmas, and you can't see your family, you can't do this,
00:03:10.480 you can't do that, more lockdowns, people calling for more lockdowns. Not enough people,
00:03:15.120 though, calling to actually tackle where the doctors who are interacting with coronavirus patients
00:03:20.800 in the hospital tell you is the hotspot and where we actually need to target, which is long-term care.
00:03:27.200 It's a real failure, and it really is a scandal that a lot of regular folks are being told,
00:03:32.240 no, you can't do your fitness class or what have you. They are being punished largely for government's
00:03:37.520 failure to actually pinpoint and address the real issues that they've already known
00:03:42.480 for quite some time. Profoundly disappointing.