What would Canada do if something much worse than COVID-19 happened？
Episode Stats
Words per minute
185.74002
Summary
The coronavirus outbreak in China has been devastating, and the response to it has been slow and inadequate. What will we do in the future when another pandemic strikes, and how will we deal with it? In this episode, I talk to Dr. Michael Hyatt, a professor of infectious disease at the University of British Columbia, about the lack of preparedness for a pandemic, and why we should be worried.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
One thing I keep thinking is that Canada's response to the coronavirus does not bode well
00:00:12.260
should we have a black swan event that is much worse than this virus has proven to be. You know,
00:00:18.500
early on when this virus first hit Wuhan, we had no idea what we were dealing with. There were
00:00:23.120
worries that this thing would have a really big fatality rate. This could be like a pandemic
00:00:27.540
never seen before in history. Who knew? Lots of question marks, lots of concerns. Thankfully,
00:00:32.420
we've learned a lot since then. Obviously, treatments have developed. You've got the
00:00:36.160
vaccines now. And we've just learned that the fatality rate is thankfully not as high as it
00:00:40.620
could have been. Not as high as we first feared. However, we really haven't necessarily adjusted
00:00:46.280
our expectations, our responses, our attitude towards lockdowns commensurate with all of that.
00:00:52.200
I mean, I think we've really failed to rise to the occasion on so many levels, to have a
00:00:57.300
properly proportional response in terms of how our politicians, our public health officials,
00:01:03.660
media, how the general public narrative is evolving or not evolving. Lots of concerns
00:01:09.360
around all of that. And the question is, what happens next? Now, every bad situation, every
00:01:14.300
disaster is going to unfold in different ways, in unique ways. So you can't say that the coronavirus
00:01:19.620
situation is indicative of what's going to happen later. But I still can't help but wonder if we had
00:01:25.020
a black swan event, which is an unlikely but serious event, an event that nobody really
00:01:31.160
expected, nobody really planned for, and we were really caught fleet-footed by it. How do you respond
00:01:36.540
to it? Now, these things vary in what they are, black swan events. Well, 9-11 has been described as one.
00:01:42.440
I wrote a book called Pulse Attack, which actually strives to separate the fact and fiction, break down the
00:01:47.860
possibility, probability of what happens if the whole electrical grid across, say, North America
00:01:53.060
collapses. How do you get it back up? How do you deal with it? This could happen through naturally
00:01:58.880
occurring phenomenon, concerns about solar flares. The probability is very, very minor, but the
00:02:04.520
possibility still exists, and through terror attack and so forth, what does one do if the electricity
00:02:09.580
grid goes down for a prolonged period of time, for weeks, for months? And I watch what we've done
00:02:15.080
during coronavirus, and one of the biggest concerns that a lot of people have been frustrated with
00:02:20.280
is there were actually government plans and protocols in place for how you respond to a
00:02:25.620
pandemic. There's the federal one, Dr. Theresa Tam signed off on the latest edition just in 2018.
00:02:31.320
There are provincial ones, there are even regional ones for separate public health regions all across
00:02:36.200
Canada. The plans are very interesting ones. They actually all presuppose that coronavirus, well,
00:02:41.360
whatever pandemic materializes, will be worse than what we're currently experiencing in terms of the
00:02:46.060
number of people who get sick with it, the volume of people who die of it, and so forth. But they also
00:02:50.880
suggest a much more targeted approach. They do not recommend broad-based lockdowns. And one looks at this
00:02:56.020
plan and goes, wow, I feel like if we'd actually stuck to the plan, we'd be in a lot better situation
00:03:01.360
than we are in now. We have all these other potential negative events, all these catastrophes,
00:03:08.320
disasters that are we even really planning for them? Are we really attuned to them? Even if we do plan for
00:03:14.020
them, would we actually follow the plans? And, well, I wish I could say something positive at the end of
00:03:19.000
all this, but I don't have too much positive to say. It's really worrisome about what about the next
00:03:25.180
time something hits the fan? How will we respond? And I think we've got to talk about that a bit more.