The long-term harms of lockdowns
Episode Stats
Words per minute
182.5225
Summary
In this episode, I discuss the long-term consequences of lockdowns, the ripple effects, the spin-off effects, and the dangers of gap years. These are things that governments seem loath to acknowledge, but which are happening all the time.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
governments seem loath to admit that there are harms to lockdowns that we are facing things
00:00:11.380
like addiction challenges suicides other societal harms that are being caused in the here and now
00:00:17.280
very real vibrant and visceral harms that a lot of canadians are experiencing but when pressed and
00:00:22.980
i've pressed some of them at press conferences and so forth they they do acknowledge that this
00:00:27.640
is going on but one thing that they have not really acknowledged at all is the very long-term
00:00:33.700
consequences of the lockdowns the ripple effects the spin-off effects things that i don't think
00:00:39.220
we're even really beginning to think about let alone talk about let alone have officials acknowledge
00:00:44.220
i had this thought once again reading about a study out of the united kingdom an opinion poll
00:00:49.000
that found that about 40 percent of university students in the uk were considering dropping out
00:00:54.940
i think that was the number that was considering and the number who are actually doing it is
00:00:58.440
probably a little lower than that but regardless you've got a crisis among university students
00:01:03.100
where they figure yeah i'm out now how many of those are just going to take another gap year and
00:01:07.980
take a year or two to to figure things out and let the system sort itself out work itself out until
00:01:13.040
in-class learning is back how many are just done period i mean maybe that first year they accumulated
00:01:17.940
some debt and they just can't afford to take on even more debt towards a year that is not going to
00:01:22.680
be a valuable one for them i don't know but what i do know is that surely surely we can't deny that
00:01:28.860
there are some consequences to all of that a certain percentage of students who are perhaps going into
00:01:34.600
fields that we really need to support society who are not going into those fields anymore or they
00:01:40.280
delaying it by a few years and you have not just gap years for them as individuals but gap years for
00:01:46.000
entire professions where you have a cohort of people who will not be entering the workforce so what does it
00:01:51.480
mean for those different industries are you going to hear two years from now a report about well there's
00:01:56.380
a crisis in this field or that field or so forth because they don't have new entry-level people they
00:02:01.540
don't have enough staffing and so forth i mean we're told right now that one of the big challenges
00:02:06.280
with icu capacity capacity and hospitalizations is that they don't actually have enough icu nurses
00:02:12.920
to uh to take care of everything and so forth to properly staff it okay fine fair enough let's deal with
00:02:19.300
that challenge but i think we're going to see similar challenges in the months ahead in the years
00:02:24.240
ahead so yes we have to talk about the very immediate harms and consequences of lockdowns but
00:02:29.520
oh boy i think the long-term ones those ripple effects are going to be even broader and they are
00:02:35.240
going to be far-reaching in ways that policymakers are not even beginning to think about right now