Juno News - September 19, 2021


Why hasn't the government done anything about hospital capacity？


Episode Stats

Length

4 minutes

Words per Minute

194.01021

Word Count

786

Sentence Count

40

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Alberta has just controversially announced that they will be introducing a vaccine passport system
00:00:09.820 and be reintroducing a number of restrictions, going into something of a mini lockdown.
00:00:15.360 At least that'll probably be the case for the unvaccinated. The vaccinated will have it a bit
00:00:20.060 easier, although there will also be restrictions on them. And what is the justification for all
00:00:25.000 this? Why are they going down this route again? Well, Premier Jason Kenney and health officials
00:00:29.080 say the hospital systems are being overwhelmed. They are at risk of collapse because of COVID-19
00:00:34.580 patients who are in the hospitals, which is the same thing that Canadians have been told in various
00:00:41.100 provinces across the country for quite some time now. That was the justification for previous lockdowns
00:00:47.400 a year ago, second wave lockdown, third wave lockdown, and so forth. And you go, hold on a second here.
00:00:53.860 You identified this problem, a hospital capacity problem, well over a year ago. And yet a year
00:01:01.360 later, you're still saying, oh guys, sorry, this problem materialized. We got to shut society down
00:01:06.200 again. We got to bring these restrictions in on your lives. Even those of you who did go and do what
00:01:10.280 we asked you to do to go get two doses of this vaccine. What's going on here? I remember videos I
00:01:16.140 recorded a year ago, columns I wrote a year ago, chastising Ontario Premier Doug Ford for not doing more
00:01:23.860 a year ago, because they knew this could be a problem. All the premiers knew this could be an
00:01:30.180 issue about scaling up hospital capacity, that that was a thing that was needed to be done.
00:01:34.740 And we talked a lot about the need for beds and so forth. And then we heard, okay, well,
00:01:37.840 the problem isn't so much beds. It's that you got to have staffing resources and so forth,
00:01:42.220 manage the personnel and so on. Okay, well, whatever the details are, I mean, there's a lot of people
00:01:46.840 in the healthcare systems all across Canada who are paid a lot of money, a lot of very high paid
00:01:52.580 bureaucrats to deal with these very issues. Issues that they've known about for over a year now.
00:02:01.520 Now, a number of health officials have talked about how COVID-19 is becoming an endemic illness.
00:02:06.880 And Dina Henshaw, she said that earlier. Now she's saying, oh no, we're not actually at the endemic
00:02:10.700 phase. We got to wait and see. But regardless of what the actual numbers are, unfortunately,
00:02:14.920 COVID-19 will be here to stay for however many years or decades or what have you. So unfortunately,
00:02:21.040 at peak times, at least, we're going to have some people in hospital with COVID-19 in perpetuity,
00:02:26.540 they're going to be taking up beds, hopefully far fewer than we have right now, of course. And that's
00:02:30.700 what Dina Henshaw is getting at about not knowing when we're really at the endemic situation
00:02:34.840 or not yet. But come on, you knew that the hospital capacity issue was going to be a problem
00:02:41.700 a year ago. Why did you not do more to solve it then? And I think journalists and politicians who
00:02:49.260 these health officials answer to and members of the general public, they need to press these points
00:02:54.880 more. I mean, if we have a problem here, let's solve the problem. Let's be solutions-based in all
00:03:00.380 of this. I mean, healthcare is typically, in every province, the number one departmental expense,
00:03:05.020 the one department that takes the greatest expenses. You've got healthcare and then you've got
00:03:08.960 education that usually comes second. We're throwing a lot of resources at it. We got a lot of people who
00:03:14.680 are paid a lot of money. Can we figure this out right now? I mean, can we also just look at the
00:03:20.620 systems and put a lot more pressure on the people managing these systems to deal with all this? Are
00:03:26.540 there different things that should be done in terms of dealing with vaccinations and so forth? Of
00:03:29.900 course. But the idea that this far down the road, shutting down segments of society, heavy restrictions
00:03:36.760 because of hospital capacity issues, which is, you know, what we pay our tax dollars to deal with,
00:03:41.520 I don't know. I think people should just be asking a few more follow-up questions about
00:03:45.820 the rationale and what has and hasn't been done. There's actually been a lot done to deal with
00:03:50.060 hospital capacity and various provinces. They have done various things, but have they done enough?
00:03:55.760 Can they do more? And I think people just need to bring these questions up more.
00:03:59.460 They need to ask these questions and strive to get more answers for them.