Juno News - September 08, 2020


Using the coronavirus as a political tool


Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

216.97855

Word count

1,318

Sentence count

67


Summary

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

In this episode, Dr. Aaron Horschig explains why it's so hard to compare apples to an orange, and why we should all stay home from school during a pandemic like the one we're in now.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 The latest reports say that the daily number of people testing positive for COVID has increased
00:00:11.840 by about 25%. And since schools are either open or about to reopen, it's really anyone's guess
00:00:17.880 what's going to happen. Now, many people want to compare the leadership of different countries and
00:00:22.740 say, well, country A did better than country B because their leaders made better decisions.
00:00:26.740 But I'm going to tell you right now why anyone who says that has absolutely no idea what they're
00:00:31.300 talking about. And that's for three main reasons. The first reason is that countries have totally
00:00:36.260 different variables from one another. And it makes it almost impossible to compare because
00:00:39.940 you're comparing apples to oranges. You might have a country that has a very, very different
00:00:44.480 social culture or work culture. People might either stand very close or far apart. They might hug,
00:00:49.760 they might kiss, they might shake hands, they might bow. These are very, very important factors,
00:00:53.900 which would affect the spread of a communicable disease. But there's also other things like
00:00:57.760 weather patterns. Are they getting enough sun? Do they maybe live on a beach where they're getting
00:01:01.400 tons of vitamin D? Do they live on a mountain where the air is thinner and it's going to affect
00:01:05.440 their lungs? Is their diet very high in vitamin C or some other kind of mineral and nutrient?
00:01:10.060 Do they prescribe hydroxychloroquine or do they have some other kind of therapy?
00:01:13.540 What's their access to healthcare? How many ventilators? There's so, so many different factors.
00:01:18.440 And so it's almost impossible, if not outright impossible, to accurately compare one country to
00:01:23.700 another and say that, well, their leaders are better or worse. Even within countries like the
00:01:27.980 United States, which is a very large country, different states are doing better than other
00:01:32.120 states. And so you'd want to maybe compare the leaders and say, well, this governor was better
00:01:35.620 than that governor. But again, many factors, almost impossible, if not actually impossible to
00:01:40.340 compare. The second reason is that we're still in the middle of this pandemic. And so there's no way
00:01:45.800 to know if the decisions we've made will ultimately be good or be bad, because only hindsight will
00:01:50.800 provide that clarity of vision. There could be a second wave or a third wave. The vaccine could
00:01:56.520 flop or it could make things worse. People could not take the vaccine. All of these things will also
00:02:01.260 affect how we make future decisions, because if we think we're on the right track, we'll maybe make
00:02:06.060 certain decisions and not make others. But it might turn out that those group of decisions were
00:02:10.560 actually worse, because again, only hindsight will allow us to say what actually was the best
00:02:15.120 decision or the best course of action. If you look at Sweden versus Canada versus the United States
00:02:20.060 versus Russia versus India, they all have very, very different reactions and different responses
00:02:24.800 to the pandemic. They've put different rules on their population. They have different infection rates
00:02:28.780 and fatality rates and different cultures. So there's a lot there to compare. And it's almost
00:02:33.580 impossible to do so in a fair and accurate way. The last one is the scientific angle. And that's
00:02:40.100 really based on a couple things. And that is first the initial advice from experts. In the beginning,
00:02:45.640 we were all told, okay, let's stay home. Let's flatten the curve. I'm sure you all remember that
00:02:49.900 there were tons of signs out there, flatten the curve, hashtag flatten the curve. That was based
00:02:54.080 on the logic that we're all going to basically get COVID or there's no real way to stop us from all
00:02:58.700 getting COVID. The only thing that we can do is stay home. So we don't all get it at the same time
00:03:03.880 and overload our healthcare system. You may recall those graphs that went super high and then crashed back
00:03:09.080 down as opposed to the sort of slow and low bumps that the flattening the curve was supposed to do,
00:03:14.160 which again, that's what it actually meant, flattening the curve. So somehow that has
00:03:20.120 transformed in a lot of people's minds into stay home, wear a mask, put a lot of hand sanitizer.
00:03:26.040 You can somehow either not get it at all until it goes away or not get it until there's a vaccine.
00:03:31.660 Now, if there's information that caused that perception to change, if the flattening the curve
00:03:36.500 idea was not a good idea and there's information that caused it to change, what was that information
00:03:41.220 and what caused it to change? Does anyone have all of that? Could it change again if that was the case?
00:03:46.520 There's also the issue of testing to put an end to this pandemic. Now, people, for example,
00:03:52.360 if you want to go get a test, you'd have to go to a testing center, you've got to get a swab done,
00:03:56.700 it might take a day or two for them to get back to you. In the meantime, you have to quarantine.
00:03:59.700 That is a pretty high accuracy, but low speed test. There are tests out there, or there are
00:04:06.060 tests that are going to come out that are lower accuracy, but much quicker. So there's a one
00:04:10.740 minute test. That one I've read anywhere provides between 70 to 90. So let's just say 80% accuracy
00:04:16.440 as to whether or not you have COVID. Now, think about it this way. If you have two armies that are
00:04:21.060 fighting and one army shoots with 100% accuracy and the other shoots with only 80% accuracy, who's going
00:04:26.440 to win. The only question is how many soldiers does each side have? So if one side has few soldiers
00:04:32.320 that shoots at 100% accuracy and the other side has tons of soldiers that shoots at 80% accuracy,
00:04:37.640 they're going to miss some shots. But because there's more soldiers making more shots, you're
00:04:41.440 going to connect with more targets and therefore defeat the other side, which has perfect accuracy.
00:04:45.940 This is kind of how you can think of those tests. Imagine that there were tests that you can get at
00:04:50.560 home, something like a saliva test or a little breath test that you would take either every day or
00:04:55.980 multiple times a day. Even if that's only 80% accurate, because you're being tested so often,
00:05:01.060 it's going to still give you a really good picture of what is going on and you're going to be able to
00:05:04.940 make better decisions. So if you got a test that was accurate on day one, you could stay home and
00:05:09.820 then test yourself again that later that day or the next amount of days and see if you've got over
00:05:16.180 the virus and what you should do about it. So all of these things, the amount of testing that they're
00:05:21.140 going to put in, the different variables in different countries, the fact that we're still in the
00:05:24.420 middle of the pandemic makes it impossible to compare one country to another. And all that's
00:05:29.000 happening is that people are using this pandemic for many other things. But in this particular
00:05:33.040 aspect, they're using it for political points or to be able to attack people, to attack Donald Trump
00:05:38.420 or to attack others, other political leaders. And that really makes no sense because it ignores a
00:05:43.440 number of the things that I've just mentioned. So the key factor is a lot of different variables,
00:05:47.800 a lot of different things to think about. And with all things, it's really the same thing.
00:05:51.260 And that's what hopefully you come away from this video understanding that things are often
00:05:55.000 much more complicated than they seem. So hopefully this video was educational and you enjoyed it.
00:05:59.880 For True North, I am Sam Ashkenazi. I hope you have a great day and thank you so much for watching.