Juno News - December 01, 2020


Why did the government shut down small businesses？

Mentioned
Doug Ford
Criminalizing Everything Green Hypocrisy - Episode 3 (Trailer)

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

181.41

Word count

648

Sentence count

38


Summary

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

Retail outlets across Ontario have been shut down due to the outbreak of coronavirus, a virus that can only be spread through contact with human flesh-to-body contact. But what does that actually mean? And why are we not talking about it more?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The Ontario government has released even more nuanced data about coronavirus cases in the
00:00:10.720 province and where they've been confirmed to be coming from. And I found this section on retail
00:00:16.320 spread particularly interesting, given that we are now moving into the Christmas shopping season,
00:00:21.040 which for many retailers is their make-or-break time. It's when they make all of their money to
00:00:25.120 keep them afloat for other months that, well, the sales aren't so hot for. And these numbers,
00:00:30.000 boy, they are telling. So they produce a graph that shows the daily number of confirmed cases
00:00:35.040 related back to retail through all of Ontario. You know what the highest day is, the highest
00:00:40.000 mega spike of retail cases? Four. Four, that's right. A couple days throughout this whole year
00:00:46.560 since the pandemic began have there been four cases traced back to retail outlets. And then
00:00:51.520 there's a bunch of days with three, a bunch of days with two, and then many, many days with one
00:00:56.720 and many, many days with zero. Zero spread directly related back to retail. And yet we've shut so much
00:01:06.000 of it down throughout so much of Ontario. What on earth is going on here? Well, I can tell you what
00:01:10.720 the public health officials say is going on here, because in truth, the majority of the numbers,
00:01:15.520 they're not really able to specify where they came from. So they chalk them up to community spread.
00:01:21.200 So when there are, say, 1,700, 1,500 cases announced in one day, over 50% of them are going
00:01:27.760 to be chalked up to this community spread. Meaning it was someone just out and about,
00:01:31.280 they were doing stuff. We don't know where they got it from. So they're arguing they could
00:01:35.760 have got it from retail. They're getting it from just society being open. So close society,
00:01:40.880 shut her all down. And I guess the big question for retail industry associations,
00:01:46.080 for individual stores, for the consumers, do you accept this? Do you buy this? You know,
00:01:51.840 there's one part of the puzzle here that is not discussed enough. And public health officials,
00:01:55.760 they actually do say this at the press conferences, beside the mayors, beside Premier Doug Ford.
00:02:00.800 They have said before that it's not really where you go, it's what you do while you're there. By which
00:02:07.680 they mean it's all about whether or not you are in close contact with someone in that indoor
00:02:13.120 setting for a prolonged period of time. The COVID alert app that the federal government is always
00:02:17.920 encouraging people to download, that doesn't actually kick in. It doesn't register an interaction
00:02:22.800 between two human beings until you are within six feet of each other for 15 minutes or more.
00:02:30.000 Why are we not talking about this more? So basically retail has been shut down because,
00:02:34.960 well, you know, maybe people are going to be in that 15 minute to six foot window.
00:02:39.360 Well, why don't we keep those things open, but then communicate more about what the real threat
00:02:45.360 is of coronavirus in those settings? The idea that this virus is being spread by sort of random
00:02:50.880 passing encounters between strangers. Well, you know, back in March, we didn't know,
00:02:54.960 we thought it was possible. Now we have so much data, research and information, and we kind of do know.
00:03:00.720 And we know that's not actually how it's happening. You do not need to be afraid of the person you're just
00:03:06.160 passing by in the aisle at the grocery store. That needs to be communicated a whole lot more,
00:03:12.400 because I think we can reopen a lot of what's been closed right now in various jurisdictions
00:03:17.120 across Canada, so long as we talk about the things that actually do need to be followed and the rules
00:03:21.920 that will actually play a productive role in decreasing the spread of the virus.