Juno News - Who actually has the coronavirus in Canada？

00:00:00.000 Just who actually has the coronavirus in Canada? Where are they located? Where have they been going?

00:00:11.600 Where did they get it from? I think these are questions that Canadians are increasingly asking

00:00:16.580 themselves, asking their friends and family, but they are not getting the answers from public

00:00:21.520 health officials. Yes, we have the statistics about how long-term care homes have been tragically

00:00:26.500 quite hard hit. That makes up a lot of cases. That makes up pretty much the majority of the deaths

00:00:32.060 that we have seen across Canada. We also know that frontline health care workers are being hit pretty

00:00:36.680 hard. I cobbled together numbers that suggest about 40% of all the coronavirus cases in Canada come from

00:00:42.580 frontline care workers, long-term care residents, and long-term care facility workers. 40%! That tells

00:00:49.020 us a couple things. That tells us, well, let's certainly do all we can to shore up personal

00:00:53.740 protective equipment for those facilities and double down on supporting them. That also tells

00:00:58.540 us that the numbers are not as high as they may seem for the rest of us walking around and about

00:01:04.060 in society. That other 60% though, where are they? Who are they coming from? And I'm not talking about

00:01:09.340 travel, community transmission, family, the sort of broad categories that we have seen some health

00:01:16.020 officials use. Where are they? Are there specific outbreak points that they figured out? I'm not asking

00:01:21.660 to be told this restaurant. Well, actually, maybe if one restaurant is very hard hit and not being

00:01:26.700 sanitary, then yes, you shouldn't get your takeout from there. But I'm not asking to know this guy's

00:01:31.740 specific name and what street that he lives on. That's patient privacy. And I get the point of all

00:01:36.460 of that. But can we just have better data to guide us in our reopenings? Because I think for a lot of

00:01:42.040 Canadians, it looks increasingly absurd to lock down all of society when not only do we know that there are

00:01:48.020 specific people who are more vulnerable to it, but perhaps specific areas of our community,

00:01:53.780 specific activities one gets up to. Can we talk about that more? And why can't we? If we're not

00:01:59.940 doing it right now, public health officials should level with us by either telling us, yes, this is where

00:02:05.780 we're hardest hit. These are the things to avoid. Or if they don't know, they should also tell us that.

00:02:11.620 Because right now, Canadians, they want to get back out there and we need to. The economy absolutely needs

00:02:17.380 to start bouncing back. So the more information we can all have to make informed choices, the better.

Juno News - May 23, 2020