Juno News - March 02, 2021


The psychological toll of the COVID-19 lockdowns

Mentioned
Anthony Mack
Scapegoats and Cancel Mobs Public health officials are not perfect

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

222.23

Word count

1,121

Sentence count

74

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I share two stories of people going to extraordinary lengths to avoid contracting coronavirus, and why it's a good thing public health officials aren't worried about public contact with people with the virus.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I want to tell you two stories of events that I recently witnessed that really illustrate how
00:00:10.040 people are going to just bonkers lengths to do what they think is avoiding contracting coronavirus
00:00:16.600 in situations where, well, I don't know if it really makes sense. You be the judge,
00:00:21.260 I'll tell you these stories. The first one, you may have seen something similar to this.
00:00:24.420 So I was walking down the sidewalk on a fairly busy street in Toronto. It was two lanes on
00:00:29.700 both sides of the road and traffic. The speed limit, I think, is 40, but people regularly go
00:00:34.380 like 60. They treat it like a thoroughfare. And there was an older lady walking down the street 1.00
00:00:38.800 and she was coming up abreast of a younger person in their 30s or what have you. I was a bit further
00:00:43.100 behind. And as they got near each other, this older person began to panic, I guess, at the prospect that
00:00:48.120 they were going to be within, you know, I don't know, three feet of another human being. And this
00:00:51.900 lady darted out into the road pretty much into oncoming traffic. I think she kind of glanced to 1.00
00:00:56.840 make sure she wasn't going to jump into a Mack truck immediately, but it was not a safe thing
00:01:02.180 that she did at all. I mean, I think she could have been hit by a car. Not a good thing to do.
00:01:06.740 I've seen similar things like that before. Maybe you've seen something like that. And the whole
00:01:11.380 thing is, you know, there's not really much outdoor transmission going on really at all. It's not a
00:01:17.200 thing that public health officials even warn people about. It's just a thing that people started
00:01:21.940 getting afraid about. And of course, the greater risk in this situation was not that two people
00:01:27.100 outdoors, it was pretty windy when I saw this, passing by for, I don't know, a second. I mean,
00:01:31.640 what are the odds of contracting coronavirus through that exchange? And I'm sure both of them,
00:01:36.880 neither of them actually had the virus. And yet she jumps almost into oncoming traffic. What was
00:01:41.700 going on there? The other situation. So I was going to a store. It was a pet store. I had to pick up
00:01:46.900 supplies for one of my children's pets. And I go to this store. And in Ontario, it's always been
00:01:51.700 unclear at certain times whether pet stores are essential or not, whether you can go into them
00:01:56.080 like grocery stores. So I wasn't 100% sure when I actually did this. And I go up to, I pull up at
00:02:01.180 the store and then I get outside and I go to the door. And then it says, do not open the door. Do not
00:02:05.840 come in. You need to have either booked online in advance or call. And if we happen to be available,
00:02:11.100 you can fulfill this over the phone. So I go, okay. So I'm standing there and I call and I say,
00:02:15.840 hi, can I get, you know, this food for this animal? And the person's kind of, you know,
00:02:20.560 looking at me in the store. I mean, it's, it's such a theatrics to do something like that. Call
00:02:25.640 people from outside the glass. Anyway, I do that. She says, okay, I'll bring it over. And then I see
00:02:31.840 her and she's kind of standing in the store, but nowhere near the door, like far away. And she's
00:02:36.180 looking at me. And then she, she gestures to me and I'm like, what? Like she's far in the store.
00:02:41.220 She's like, I like 10 meters away from the door. So I opened the door and I find that what she's
00:02:47.120 done is she's put the pin pad for the credit card right there at the front of the door. And she is
00:02:51.700 like at the back of the store, pretty much. She's masked up and everything. And she says, oh, are you
00:02:56.260 Anthony? And I'm like, what? Yeah. I'm the guy who you saw talking to you on the phone. Obviously
00:03:00.080 I'm Anthony. So I put my credit card on the pin pad. I'm like, all right, this is kind of odd. How's
00:03:04.360 she going to get me the things I've ordered? Because they're not waiting there in front of the door.
00:03:08.280 Maybe she will walk towards me. She had it on a cart and she pushed the cart at me. And then I 0.95
00:03:16.160 kind of caught it and I got the animal food and I laughed. And it's like, okay, part of the
00:03:22.380 conversation that's been happening in Ontario with retail outlets closed is we know hardly any, any
00:03:27.940 cases of coronavirus transmission have been traced back to retail because as we know, as I hope we
00:03:33.780 should all know by now, public health officials say it's really 15 minutes or more of prolonged
00:03:38.800 indoor close contact that is, uh, that brings about transmission of the virus. So these sort of
00:03:43.660 fleeting exchanges we have, where you're just, you know, paying at the cashier terminal for 60 seconds
00:03:48.680 or whatnot, that's not really a thing where they believe the virus can spread. So I see this lady 0.99
00:03:54.400 doing this. I go, what are you going to do? And if next week they open up the pet store and you're
00:03:59.280 going to have customers walking around with you. And I feel like that lady, and I feel like the
00:04:03.200 person who I saw on the sidewalk, I mean, these are, these people are psychologically damaged people.
00:04:08.320 And I really feel for them because are they going to be able to get out of that state of mind
00:04:13.900 as soon as the rules change, as soon as public health officials say, oh, you don't need to jump
00:04:17.860 into the sidewalk, even though they're not already telling you to do that right now.
00:04:21.300 If they get vaccinated, are they going to lose these concerns or is this going to stick with you?
00:04:25.220 I feel like this is not a sort of thing that you can just suddenly turn off. So I'm just very
00:04:30.220 concerned that the way we've been talking about coronavirus and risk assessment, the things
00:04:35.280 public health officials have and haven't been saying has been creating a situation where there
00:04:40.040 are people in this country who are not just, you know, taking precautions because they're high risk
00:04:45.540 individuals, but people who are, who are damaged right now in terms of how they're going to be
00:04:51.580 interacting in society for years to come. And I don't know what to say about it other than it's
00:04:57.000 something that has left me deeply dismayed and concerned about my fellow citizens.