Juno News - The untold stories of Canada’s lockdowns

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.

Juno News - June 01, 2022

The untold stories of Canada’s lockdowns

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript