Juno News - The provinces are moving backwards

In the wake of the coronavirus crisis in Canada, what are the lessons we have learned from the past 9 months? What have we learned, and where do we need to go from here in terms of public health and public policy?

00:00:00.000 It's been rather troubling to see some provinces in Canada moving backwards when it comes to their

00:00:09.760 coronavirus approach. I'm thinking particularly of Manitoba and Ontario under stricter lockdowns

00:00:16.480 than, well, in Manitoba's case that they've ever seen. In Ontario's case, moving back to the way

00:00:21.080 things pretty much were in the spring. So moving backwards in that regard, but also moving backwards

00:00:26.780 in another way that is kind of troubling in a way that suggests we've either lost, forgotten,

00:00:33.420 or just ignoring a lot of the great lessons that we have learned in the past nine months.

00:00:39.100 So go back to the first wave, and there was just a lot we didn't know about this virus. 0.98

00:00:42.800 What is this darn thing? How do you treat it? Who's most vulnerable? Who is it hitting the hardest? 0.97

00:00:48.240 What do we think about vaccines? Are they going to be effective? What are the timelines for them?

00:00:51.840 Lots of questions out there, pretty much zero answered. Now there are still some variables

00:00:57.500 out there that we don't have answers to, questions like long COVID and so forth, but there are other

00:01:01.800 issues that, well, many issues that we actually have learned a whole lot more about. One of those

00:01:08.240 things that we've talked about a lot, and we talked about it, I think, mostly in the summer,

00:01:12.480 was talking about all the secondary harms that come about from the lockdowns. A lot of media reports,

00:01:19.440 a lot of experts stepping forward to talk about, say, the rise in mental illness, mental health

00:01:24.100 challenges, addiction. We had a lot of addictions workers speak out on that. A psychiatry journal

00:01:28.820 predicting that there would be excess suicides from about 500 to 2,000. It was a pretty wide berth,

00:01:34.640 but that's what their modeling projected that the lockdowns would cause here in Canada. A whole bunch

00:01:39.260 of different conversations. You know what I'm talking about. And public health officials and

00:01:42.980 politicians, I guess when they were pressed at the podium back then, when we were talking about those

00:01:47.320 things more, they acknowledged. Yes, they were part of the conversation, and then they moved on.

00:01:51.320 Now, they announced new restrictions, as Manitoba and Ontario did. And I did not really hear,

00:01:56.840 when they were up at the podium, the acknowledgement of those challenges. And this conversation that,

00:02:02.460 look, the line is a bit of a crude one that, okay, the cure cannot be worse than the illness,

00:02:06.440 but still that broader idea, where are we at right now? How are they actually balancing

00:02:11.640 those trade-offs? And it's very troubling that they did not acknowledge that when Manitoba and

00:02:17.340 Ontario announced these new, very severe restrictions. I don't know if they forgot or

00:02:23.520 they're just not thinking about it, or they don't want to think about it, or they have a very good

00:02:27.160 argument as to why those things should not actually be applicable right now. If they do,

00:02:31.060 though, I'd certainly like to hear it. And we didn't hear that. So are we just forgetting the

00:02:36.920 lessons that we have learned the past eight months, particularly when it comes to these secondary

00:02:42.220 harms? It looks that way. And it's very troubling. And I think more Canadians need to raise their hand

00:02:48.400 and ask some really firm follow-up questions.

Juno News - November 23, 2020

The provinces are moving backwards

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