Western Standard - September 29, 2023


Damage caused by school closures for COVID

Topics
school closures and data for COVID response
CMS： Canada’s government is in total disarray under Trudeau Research into damage caused by school closures for COVID...

Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

149.03

Word count

268

Sentence count

14


Summary

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

In this episode, we talk about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the education system in Canada, and how governments across the country failed to act on the overwhelming lack of data and data available at the time.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 So what our report really looks into is what information exactly did policymakers, including governments across Canada,
00:00:08.560 we looked at each provincial government, including in Alberta, where you are, looking at what did they know exactly?
00:00:15.580 And also, when did they know it?
00:00:17.540 Did they have any information that would guide their policymaking or were they really just flying blind?
00:00:22.340 And I think it's very reasonable to say that, OK, within the first, let's say, one, two, maybe even three months, there wasn't a lot of good data.
00:00:31.760 There was a lot of uncertainty and fear during that period in the pandemic.
00:00:37.200 And so school closures happened.
00:00:39.140 But the reality is that in Canada and including Alberta, schools were closed in Alberta well into January 2022.
00:00:47.940 So that's spanning three school years.
00:00:49.800 In other parts of Canada, they were closed up until February 2022.
00:00:54.500 And so just to put that into context, that is 110 days minimum that Alberta students missed due to school closures related to the pandemic, which began in March of 2020.
00:01:07.620 And our report really found that there was a no good reason, no evidence informed reason to believe that school closures would help in terms of the health and safety of children or even necessarily stopping the spread of COVID-19.
00:01:23.860 And certainly we knew very early on, if we're being really, really conservative in what we're saying, by December 2020, at the latest, that there was almost no significant health risk to children of COVID-19.
00:01:42.180 And yet governments continued to close schools.
00:01:45.360 So they really didn't let the data inform their response.