Juno News - November 12, 2020


What is Canada's pandemic objective？


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

189.9125

Word count

615

Sentence count

34


Summary

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

What is the plan for dealing with the coronavirus pandemic in Canada? What is the strategy, the goal, the objective? What are we actually trying to accomplish here? Is it to get to zero? Or is it something else?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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.