Juno News - June 01, 2022


The untold stories of Canada’s lockdowns

Mentioned
Paul Bernardo Scarborough
Trudeau’s handgun ban won’t make Canadians safer Trudeau’s Wokest Week (Ft. Andrew Lawton)

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

175.25

Word count

978

Sentence count

47

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, Dr. Sos talks about what it was like to work in the ICU during the peak of the pandemic in the early 2000s. She talks about the horrors of lockdowns, and the unintended consequences of government policies that kept patients in isolation for months at a time.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Dr. Sos, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about, I mean, you worked on the front lines,
00:00:04.800 you were there, you witnessed it with your own eyes, you saw firsthand the effects of lockdowns,
00:00:10.640 the sort of unintended consequences of government policies, and in many ways how the prescription,
00:00:16.480 the supposed cure, was worse than the disease in terms of lockdowns being worse than the
00:00:21.880 pandemic itself. So I was hoping you could walk our audience through a little bit of what that
00:00:27.700 looked like, some of the worst things that you saw as a doctor working in the ICUs, and some of the
00:00:32.460 things that maybe Canadians aren't even really aware of what was going on during COVID.
00:00:38.880 Okay, well, so I saw some horrible things. I spoke last time I was on your show about in a single
00:00:44.840 week admitting multiple elders from nursing homes who were starving to death because their families
00:00:49.220 were banned from the premises in the name of social distancing, and so there was no one to feed them,
00:00:53.460 and they almost died of starvation in Canada in 2020, 2021. Some things I didn't get to speak
00:01:02.820 about were the obvious worsening of addictions problems. I saw some folks who quite literally
00:01:10.360 drank themselves to death, and unlike starvation, that's not necessarily something we can fix when
00:01:16.760 you get in. So I did see some younger folks, mid 30s, mid 40s, who died of alcohol. And, you know,
00:01:25.440 in taking the stories from them, it was very clear, they lost their job, they'd been shut in for three
00:01:29.100 months, people aren't supposed to live that way. And they turned to drink and never, never recovered.
00:01:35.520 I had read about catatonic depression as a medical student, that means depression so severe that
00:01:42.700 you're in a coma. I don't generally look after folks for depression, because I'm not a psychiatrist.
00:01:49.100 But if you're in a coma from your depression, you do often come under the care of a medical doctor.
00:01:53.660 And like I said, I'd never seen a case, I saw two in 2020. One man after six months of not leaving his
00:02:00.900 house, whose wife said was perfectly lovely gentleman, 35 years of marriage, he tried to strangle her, 1.00
00:02:06.760 and he collapsed and fell into a coma. I saw a woman who tried to kill her grandchildren after being
00:02:14.020 locked in with them for three months. And when she sort of came to out of whatever that state she was
00:02:19.760 in, she said that wasn't me, she couldn't, she couldn't believe that she'd done it. We, you know,
00:02:26.380 working in Kingston, I, where all the federal prisons are, I have looked after serial killers,
00:02:32.940 and I've learned a little bit about the prison system in Canada. And Paul Bernardo gets an hour
00:02:39.780 of sunlight a day. So if you're a serial killer, and you're in our federal prison system, and you
00:02:45.960 behave badly, you get put in isolation, isolation is considered a punishment for the very worst of the
00:02:50.580 worst. And we did that to all Canadians. And so the ravages thereof were just visible all over the 0.80
00:02:58.280 system. I hate to talk about this, but I had a colleague, a friend, a wonderful ICU nurse who
00:03:04.500 died by suicide last summer, and her obituary pointed out that the effects of lockdowns have
00:03:11.960 been very difficult on her mental health. So I saw, and then in terms of the public commentary, it was
00:03:18.500 all, everyone stay home for the sake of our healthcare workers. But all of this is very hard on
00:03:24.120 healthcare workers. I would say that every time I went to the hospital, there was a new rule about,
00:03:30.180 you know, masking and checking in, and you can't, you can no longer have potlucks. At a hospital I'm
00:03:35.880 familiar with, the nurses received an email from the management on Christmas Eve saying the management
00:03:41.860 was going to walk around and make sure nobody was having a potluck on Christmas Eve. And if you were,
00:03:46.080 you'd be fired on the spot. So there were just all sorts of inhumane things. I saw
00:03:52.500 patients of mine, who the healthcare team had to fight for them to get to see their loved ones
00:03:59.000 before they died. I had patients who were between life and death in the ICU for three months, whose
00:04:04.780 families were not allowed to visit them for the duration. I was at a time when patients from
00:04:10.020 Scarborough were being transferred elsewhere, and Scarborough was considered a red zone. And so
00:04:14.600 their families were not allowed to come visit. And one of the worst things I saw was a young
00:04:23.000 Indigenous man with a disability and a severe medical problem flew down from a reserve. And his mom came
00:04:31.640 as his translator, and she was kicked out of the hospital. So she'd flown in. And when she arrived,
00:04:37.480 she was told there's no hospital visitors. And she was kicked out at four in the morning in a strange city,
00:04:41.400 where she didn't know anyone. And I'm sorry to say I don't know what became of her. But
00:04:47.800 so I guess I would say I saw all sorts of miserable things that I call Russian novel levels of despair. 1.00
00:04:57.160 And none of these things make it to the CP24 news crawler. They were breathlessly reporting cases of
00:05:03.080 COVID and deaths from COVID. And those things are important. My background, I came to medicine with a
00:05:08.440 degree in English literature, my background is in the humanities. And, and I, I think that some
00:05:13.480 things can only be expressed humanistically. And maybe some of those folks in those terrible
00:05:17.240 situations will write novels about what they went through. But I think it'll be many years before
00:05:21.320 we fully grasp what, what was perpetrated on our population these last two years.