Juno News - The silver lining changes of the pandemic

00:00:00.000 So the other day I get a flyer delivered to my mailbox. I'm taking a look through it. It's for

00:00:09.800 food delivery. I go, oh, this pizza looks nice, this pasta thing they're sending out. That looks

00:00:14.580 pretty cool too. Maybe I'll give that a shot. And then I get to the section that says, and what beer

00:00:19.660 would you like brought with your pizza? What wine would you like brought? And I start to get a little

00:00:24.580 nervous. I go, well, what is this establishment? Is this like some sort of prohibition era mobster?

00:00:29.980 And they're putting this flyer in my mailbox. Am I getting involved with a criminal enterprise

00:00:34.160 here? I don't feel too good about this. My heart starts to flutter a little bit because of course,

00:00:38.860 in Ontario, you've never been able to do that before in my lifetime. Deliver alcohol along with

00:00:45.020 a pizza. I mean, that's crazy talk. Of course, no, that's the new normal. Now during the pandemic,

00:00:50.980 the provincial government, just like that with the snap of a finger has changed the rules,

00:00:55.400 the status quo as they have always been. It used to be illegal to provide a bottle of beer with pizza

00:01:00.740 delivery. Now you can to help out restaurants with the fact that, well, they're not doing too

00:01:05.660 well without being able to have dine-in business. And you know what? The sky hasn't fallen. It makes

00:01:11.260 sense, and it makes sense to keep it around continually now. There's a lot of examples of stuff like that

00:01:18.000 happening right now. Rules are suddenly being changed very quickly. Rules that a lot of people have been

00:01:22.900 asking for for years, and which when it was proposed to government, they'd say, oh, well, we don't know

00:01:28.040 about that. Let's not be too wild here. Let's not move too fast. And yet, because we're living in

00:01:33.320 unprecedented times, they were able to make these changes quickly. Good on them. There are many

00:01:39.400 different examples. I'll give you another one from my own life. One of my children had a bit of a skin

00:01:44.680 issue, like an eczema or something, and the creams that we had bought at the store, they just weren't

00:01:49.440 working. So we thought maybe we need some sort of a prescription. Now, taking small kids to the

00:01:53.600 doctor's office is always a hassle. You travel there, and then you're in the waiting room, and

00:01:57.640 they're all kicking and screaming and all of that. So what we did was we got an appointment with the

00:02:01.840 doctor, and it was a virtual appointment. You give a call. You send in a picture of the rash on your

00:02:09.680 phone. You send in a JPEG of it. The doctor looks at it. It's not something that requires an in-person

00:02:14.800 examination. The doctor, she's maybe working from home, and then she says, yeah, this is what it is.

00:02:19.140 Yeah, the stuff you buy at the store, it's not going to work. You need a prescription from the

00:02:22.520 pharmacist. I'll email it to you. Virtual stuff, bam, bam, just like that. It stopped people from

00:02:27.520 going into traffic. It's been a lot quicker, of course, because you haven't had all these people

00:02:31.320 sitting in the waiting room. It's a lot more efficient. The medical system is able to work a

00:02:35.980 lot better, and we've had doctors previously talk about these over-the-phone appointments, these

00:02:40.220 virtual appointments. Now, all these changes are happening, and I say, good, let's not revert back to the

00:02:46.760 new normal in this regard. Some things we are going to want to return to it. Some people are

00:02:51.400 going to prefer to see the doctor in person, and I get that, but hey, speaking to the doctor over the

00:02:56.640 phone, getting a beer with your pizza, these aren't particularly wild ideas anyway, so they are some

00:03:02.480 silver lining changes that the pandemic has brought to our lives.

Juno News - June 07, 2020