Juno News - September 02, 2021


The media is failing Canadians when it comes to COVID-19

Topics
media amplification comorbidity data
Mentioned
COVID-19 Patty Hadju
If Trudeau loses this key demographic, it’s over for the Liberals Ontario sells out for vaccine passports

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

181.54

Word count

853

Sentence count

50


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about how the lack of media coverage of COVID19 is holding us back from making real progress in understanding it, and why we need to do more to learn to live with it.

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 One of the things that I think is really holding back us making progress on tackling with and
00:00:09.840 thinking about COVID-19 in Canada is media amplification. What do I mean by that? Well,
00:00:16.740 I have an iPhone, an Apple product, and I have that Apple news thingy on the phone. I should
00:00:20.820 probably turn it off, turn off the notifications, but the default is that it's on. I imagine that's
00:00:25.220 default for many people. So I get this ping when big news happens, when a celebrity dies or a big
00:00:31.360 piece of government legislation is introduced and so forth. And I've been getting pings about
00:00:35.720 certain coronavirus news. For instance, I got a ping to say Quebec introducing vaccine passports
00:00:41.540 a few weeks ago. Now, if something is going to ping right on your phone screen, it's clearly
00:00:46.420 really bringing it to people's attention. I mean, everybody, whether or not they want to be plugged
00:00:50.780 into the news, there it is right in the front screen of their phone. And it sort of provokes
00:00:55.040 them to think about it and maybe start talking to the person beside them. Oh, look at this. Look
00:00:58.720 what Quebec did. Why aren't we doing it in Ontario? Maybe we should do it in Ontario and so forth. And
00:01:03.100 then they did do it in Ontario. And that's the stuff that is amplified. That's the news that is really
00:01:09.460 pushed in front of people's faces. And it's telling about the things that are pushed in front of people's
00:01:15.060 faces. And then the news that is not. There's a lot of stuff about COVID-19, very factual based
00:01:22.040 government statistics, things various medical experts have said that I think are really important
00:01:26.980 to us understanding how to learn to live with COVID as a number of chief medical officers of health
00:01:31.660 have said throughout Canada, how to make positive progress, how to get on with our lives,
00:01:36.280 information that would be so helpful to help us with that and to help the public understand why it's
00:01:42.860 okay to do that stuff and help them understand why it's important. But that information has not hit
00:01:49.040 critical mass. It is not being amplified. There's one thing that I used to write about. I wrote about
00:01:54.940 several times. I wrote a number of columns about it coming up almost a year ago now, which is about
00:01:58.780 the Alberta comorbidity data. I say Alberta data because other provinces don't disclose as well as
00:02:04.980 Alberta does. But right there on their government website, their COVID-19 fact sheet website,
00:02:10.580 they break down the comorbidities. So the serious underlying conditions connected with people who have had
00:02:16.680 serious outcomes with COVID and tragically, the people who have died from it. And it has pretty
00:02:20.980 much been consistent throughout dealing with COVID-19 that three quarters of the people who have died of
00:02:28.160 COVID-19 have not just had an underlying condition, but have had three or more underlying conditions.
00:02:36.040 Currently, as I record this, the statistic is 76.2% of the people who have died of COVID-19 in Alberta
00:02:43.620 had three or more underlying conditions. The percentage of people who did not at all have
00:02:49.680 any underlying conditions is 3.2% of Alberta's deaths. So that's an interesting statistic that I
00:02:57.460 would say most people in Canada do not know, but they should know because that information just helps
00:03:04.880 us understand a bit more about how COVID-19 is being experienced, how it's unfolding here
00:03:11.940 in the hospitals, in the ICUs among Canadians. It can perhaps inform us to better help people who are
00:03:17.800 having serious outcomes and perhaps also inform ways for low-risk persons to go and get on with
00:03:23.080 their lives. But that is information that is not being encouraged in the media amplification stuff.
00:03:29.420 That news is not pinging on your phone and being presented to you as, hey, here's something we think
00:03:34.160 you must know. In fact, as some of you may know, I was bizarrely attacked for reporting
00:03:39.140 that basic rudimentary data. And Patty Hadju, health minister actually in the House of Commons,
00:03:44.780 denounced that reporting is fake news, even though it's just Alberta government data. So
00:03:48.600 they were very hostile to that information being discussed. So some info being amplified,
00:03:54.600 being rammed down your throats, and other information, completely accurate or important
00:03:59.500 information that is just not really being discussed out there as much as it should. Other people aren't
00:04:05.320 sending it out there, picking up the ball and running with it. I'm not just talking about my own work.
00:04:08.700 I'm not trying to say, complain why it wasn't my own reporting on the comorbidity data more
00:04:14.200 amplified and so forth. I mean, that's just one example. There are many other examples and many
00:04:18.520 news outlets who are reporting things that you go, hey, that's really important. More people should
00:04:22.380 know that. And they just drop it. And it just fizzles away. And yet some of the information that
00:04:28.000 fizzles away is the most integral information for people to understand. So very disturbing how media
00:04:35.420 amplification is working or failing Canadians when it comes to COVID-19.