Juno News - What is Canada's pandemic objective？

00:00:00.000 There's one big point out there when it comes to managing the pandemic in Canada that I feel has

00:00:11.280 not been made enough, even though I feel like some people have been banging the drum non-stop

00:00:16.580 about this issue. And that point is what is the plan? What is the strategy, the goal, the objective?

00:00:23.540 What are we actually trying to accomplish here? It's something not being discussed as much by members

00:00:30.800 of the general public. It's not being discussed by top public health officials and by politicians.

00:00:37.220 That is a very alarming, very problematic thing, perhaps even more alarming than just the daily

00:00:43.660 case counts, which continue to rise right now during the second wave. And we're hearing a lot

00:00:48.320 of alarm over the fact that the days pass and new records are being set in provinces all across

00:00:53.960 the country. Certainly not a good thing, of course. And ICU rates are very slightly rising. They are

00:00:58.980 not rising as high as the projections thought they would. In Ontario, they projected low-end,

00:01:04.900 medium, and high-end projections. For weeks, Ontario was actually below the low-end, I should say,

00:01:10.920 sometimes significantly below the low-end. Now, we're just about at the low-end projections in

00:01:15.920 Ontario. Okay, that's not great. It would be best if we came in much lower than them, but, you know,

00:01:20.580 we're nowhere near the medium and nowhere at all near the high-end projections. So what do we do with

00:01:26.540 all of this information? Well, the cases are rising, not as bad as we thought they would, and yet we're

00:01:31.180 still getting really alarmed over it. We're still freaking out about it all. Why is that? I think it's

00:01:36.680 because we don't have a plan. We don't have a strategy. We don't know what to do. Well, Fury, what do you

00:01:42.380 mean by that? I mean, obviously, the health officials, they want to minimize deaths, and they

00:01:46.120 want to deal with these cases, and, you know, that's the plan. Just kind of get rid of coronavirus

00:01:50.380 or something. Okay, fine, but let's dig a little deeper. Let's be a little nuanced here. Is the goal

00:01:55.620 to flatten the curve, which we did successfully the first time around? Now, in the second wave, well,

00:02:01.800 we're seeing the curve go up, but it's a very different curve. All the indicators and numbers are

00:02:06.020 different than the first wave. So should we talk about flattening this second curve? And if so,

00:02:10.620 what do we do? And how is it different than the first wave? They're not acknowledging those nuances.

00:02:15.820 Or is it to be an eliminationist, as the phrase is used, sometimes rather kind of mockingly, of those

00:02:21.520 people who say zero cases, zero. Francois Legault actually said, one death is too many. And I appreciate

00:02:28.720 the sort of rah-rah politician component of that, but the bottom line is pretty much any serious person

00:02:34.780 acknowledges that even after a vaccine, you're still going to have people probably every year for the

00:02:39.780 rest of our lives die of this coronavirus. I mean, it's just the thing that happens, like with the flu and

00:02:44.600 like with other illnesses there. So is it to get to zero? Seems pretty wild and seems pretty untenable.

00:02:50.840 Will totally destroy the economy and many people's lives. Or is it something else? And what else could that be?

00:02:57.820 We need to talk this out more. Because if we can't talk this out, if we can't agree on what we're supposedly

00:03:04.040 hashtag all in this together on, well, then we're not going to be all in it together. We're going to be

00:03:09.320 increasingly rather frustrated and divided in how we talk about all this.

Juno News - November 12, 2020