Juno News - August 09, 2020


The science shows schools can re-open safely

Topics
school reopening debates
Mentioned
Theresa Tam
The Trudeau government's total disregard for the taxpayer Leadership Matters

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

173.03

Word count

777

Sentence count

43


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about why I don't think there's much to be worried about when it comes to going back to school, and why the school system doesn't need to worry about kids getting infected with coronavirus.

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 Perhaps the most contentious debate that is underway in Canada right now about the different
00:00:10.000 reopenings of aspects of society is the one pertaining to the school system, and to what
00:00:15.200 degree we reopen schools in September, and what protocols we put in place to keep them safe.
00:00:20.960 Now, in some respects, I totally get this. I speak as a parent of some young children myself,
00:00:26.240 and we all know that caring for our children, that is top priority for everyone, for all parents out
00:00:31.680 there. So I get that there's going to be extra alarm, extra caution when it comes to things
00:00:36.240 involving our kids. But at the same time, I feel like this is one of those subjects that has been
00:00:41.680 completely lacking all evidence-based decision making, all science, as the liberals like to
00:00:47.440 proclaim, as if everything is science, until the moment it's not. When Dr. Theresa Tam says masks
00:00:52.240 don't work, that's science. And then the next day, when she says they do work, and I want to mandate
00:00:56.720 all of you to wear them, suddenly that is also science. Okay, fine. But where is the science when
00:01:02.240 it comes to the school debates? Because we have a lot of concerns out there, a lot of fear-mongering
00:01:06.720 going on. And look, I get there's a lot of conflicting stuff going out from experts. You
00:01:12.640 turn on the cable news, and at one moment you see some senior epidemiologists saying this thing,
00:01:17.840 and then in the very next program, you see another epidemiologist saying the exact opposite. So it's
00:01:23.120 really frustrating. And sometimes you're not able to take basic facts with assurances that you can
00:01:29.680 actually take them to the bank, that they are going to be 100% valid come the week after or the week
00:01:34.720 after that, when some new evidence comes along and pushes the old evidence aside. I do think, though,
00:01:40.560 the school system and how coronavirus affects children is one of those that we've been pretty
00:01:46.000 consistent on throughout. And we're seeing a lot of evidence that tells us, relax. There's really
00:01:51.440 not that much to be afraid of when it comes to going back to school. A lot of studies out there
00:01:57.120 that tell us children hardly get coronavirus at all. And if they get it, they are not particularly
00:02:02.720 hard hit by it. And there is no indication that they are actually really spreading it to adults all
00:02:08.480 that much. Very little evidence of it. So when I've spoken about this or written about this before,
00:02:13.840 some people say, okay, fine, the kids themselves, they're not going to get it. But what about the
00:02:18.160 teachers? And what about the kids taking it home to their parents and their grandparents,
00:02:22.000 people who might be immunocompromised? Well, right now, the evidence just doesn't show that
00:02:26.560 that's something that's happening. Although you better believe the teachers unions are latching on to
00:02:31.200 whatever fearmongering facts they can to justify more and more from the school system, from the boards,
00:02:36.800 and from the taxpayers. Now, I think one of the most probably slam dunk statistics that tells us
00:02:43.520 we don't have to be worried about our particular kids per se, regardless of whether or not they
00:02:47.920 spread it to adults, is the numbers of kids who have been infected in Canada, and more particularly,
00:02:53.520 the number who have been hospitalized and the number who have died. There have only been 100 kids
00:02:58.480 who have been hospitalized in Canada. And by kids, I actually mean people under the age of 19,
00:03:02.720 under the age of 20. So that includes teenagers. The number of people under the age of 20 who have
00:03:08.000 died in Canada from coronavirus, get this, one. And it's believed that person already had another
00:03:14.720 underlying illness. So maybe you can't actually chalk their death up to coronavirus. Maybe their
00:03:20.080 death was more caused by something else. Because we have this weird accounting mechanism in place,
00:03:24.640 where if you die while you have coronavirus, but you have actually died of that other thing,
00:03:29.600 it's counted as a COVID death. So there you have it. All the facts, the statistics, research them,
00:03:34.640 look around. They really suggest that while there are some things we should be more concerned about
00:03:38.720 than others, like our elderly and long-term care facilities, the school system doesn't seem to be
00:03:43.920 the case. So yes, let's try and implement as many measures as we can, enhanced hygiene, hand washing,
00:03:49.040 and so forth. But I really don't think we need to be afraid of kids and the return to school.
00:03:59.600 So
00:04:11.680 what do you think?
00:04:17.120 Check out other people