00:00:00.000How would our response to COVID-19 have been different if social media didn't exist?
00:00:11.320It's a hypothetical question. It's an interesting thought experiment to put out there.
00:00:16.200It's a question I've seen a lot of people pose, rather ironically, on social media.
00:00:20.140I've heard people ask that question, and it's an interesting one to take a look at.
00:00:24.940Because would we have had a more measured response, a less manic response,
00:00:30.880where every second we're continually looking at every little data point and obsessing over this and that,
00:00:37.140and then sides develop, it becomes a sort of debate, a classic online culture war.
00:00:42.720Those things have certainly happened in recent months, in the past year and a half with COVID-19.
00:00:47.480If we didn't have social media, would all of those facets of response to the pandemic been different?
00:00:53.840I think back to when SARS happened in 2003 in Toronto.
00:00:58.660It happened in other places around the world, but Toronto was one of the places where it was most acutely felt.
00:01:03.620And of course, to put the disclaimer out there, two very different viruses in many different respects.
00:01:08.940But I do remember what it was like then, and I remember not actually knowing all that much about it.
00:01:15.700It not really being a thing that that many people were talking about in their day-to-day lives.
00:01:21.400I was in university at the time, and there was no social media, and I read the newspapers, and I guess I watched the TV news a bit.
00:01:30.200I was busy doing other stuff, though. I wasn't always looking at the newspapers.
00:01:33.740I wasn't always watching the TV news, and it was something that was very much in the background.
00:01:39.740Now, of course, that was a virus that was not spreading more broadly out of the hospital system than what they were acutely dealing with.
00:01:46.080Healthcare workers, though, they were very panicked about it. They were very stressed about it.
00:01:50.460And back when COVID-19 first broke in January, February, March of 2020, I had doctors on my SiriusXM show talking about being on the front lines for SARS,
00:02:00.580all the concerns they had, how those concerns were now returning.
00:02:03.300And we certainly felt their anxieties out in the news, out on social media, rightly so, because we wanted to learn from people who had been on the front lines during a previous outbreak.
00:02:13.800But it was interesting that those concerns weren't as amplified back 20 years ago.
00:02:20.000Of course, different situation, but it still just makes me wonder if there had been social media during the time of SARS,
00:02:25.980would there have also been a different response to that, a different sort of tone?
00:02:30.920Because for most people in Toronto, I think one of the main responses to SARS was that there was this SARS concert,
00:02:37.440and you got to get a ticket to the Rolling Stones for $20.
00:02:40.560And I don't say that to be insensitive to those people who did die of SARS back in Toronto 20 years ago,
00:02:46.900but that was actually sort of most people's memory of what happened back then, a very different situation.
00:02:54.100And I think one of the things maybe we can take away in looking at that question of how would things be different with social media
00:03:01.480is maybe now we should also kind of temper how we respond to a lot of the social media mania out there.
00:03:10.840A reminder that social media is not real life, that there are concerns up there,
00:03:15.080that some government decisions are being made more to appease voices that disproportionately speak to the social media mob
00:03:23.100as opposed to be more reflective of what the actual evidence that they're slowly and cautiously corralling tells them to do.