Juno News - November 23, 2020The provinces are moving backwards
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Summary
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?
Transcript
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It's been rather troubling to see some provinces in Canada moving backwards when it comes to their
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coronavirus approach. I'm thinking particularly of Manitoba and Ontario under stricter lockdowns
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than, well, in Manitoba's case that they've ever seen. In Ontario's case, moving back to the way
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things pretty much were in the spring. So moving backwards in that regard, but also moving backwards
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in another way that is kind of troubling in a way that suggests we've either lost, forgotten,
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or just ignoring a lot of the great lessons that we have learned in the past nine months.
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So go back to the first wave, and there was just a lot we didn't know about this virus.
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What is this darn thing? How do you treat it? Who's most vulnerable? Who is it hitting the hardest?
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What do we think about vaccines? Are they going to be effective? What are the timelines for them?
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Lots of questions out there, pretty much zero answered. Now there are still some variables
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out there that we don't have answers to, questions like long COVID and so forth, but there are other
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issues that, well, many issues that we actually have learned a whole lot more about. One of those
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things that we've talked about a lot, and we talked about it, I think, mostly in the summer,
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was talking about all the secondary harms that come about from the lockdowns. A lot of media reports,
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a lot of experts stepping forward to talk about, say, the rise in mental illness, mental health
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challenges, addiction. We had a lot of addictions workers speak out on that. A psychiatry journal
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predicting that there would be excess suicides from about 500 to 2,000. It was a pretty wide berth,
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but that's what their modeling projected that the lockdowns would cause here in Canada. A whole bunch
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of different conversations. You know what I'm talking about. And public health officials and
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politicians, I guess when they were pressed at the podium back then, when we were talking about those
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things more, they acknowledged. Yes, they were part of the conversation, and then they moved on.
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Now, they announced new restrictions, as Manitoba and Ontario did. And I did not really hear,
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when they were up at the podium, the acknowledgement of those challenges. And this conversation that,
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look, the line is a bit of a crude one that, okay, the cure cannot be worse than the illness,
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but still that broader idea, where are we at right now? How are they actually balancing
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those trade-offs? And it's very troubling that they did not acknowledge that when Manitoba and
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Ontario announced these new, very severe restrictions. I don't know if they forgot or
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they're just not thinking about it, or they don't want to think about it, or they have a very good
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argument as to why those things should not actually be applicable right now. If they do,
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though, I'd certainly like to hear it. And we didn't hear that. So are we just forgetting the
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lessons that we have learned the past eight months, particularly when it comes to these secondary
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harms? It looks that way. And it's very troubling. And I think more Canadians need to raise their hand