Western Standard - November 20, 2022


HANNAFORD： ＂Masks are not the answer...＂


Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

150.26218

Word count

917

Sentence count

62

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Health Canada says the number of Canadians dying from the flu is actually down, and it s actually been dropping off since the middle of October. So why are we still seeing so many deaths from this flu season? And why is it happening?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.400 It's funny how kids who play in the dirt end up healthier than the ones who don't.
00:00:06.160 Something about developing immunity would that be?
00:00:09.760 So when you close the schools during a pandemic and send home the kids,
00:00:14.080 don't be surprised that with no chance to develop immunities,
00:00:18.160 when they do come back to school they get everything that's going around,
00:00:22.480 and they bring it home to you. The difference is, if we're talking about COVID-19,
00:00:28.080 but kids are low risk for COVID, but moms and dads can end up feeling like they've been hit by a truck.
00:00:34.960 People tell me it's like a once-in-a-decade dose of the flu.
00:00:39.200 Unsurprisingly then, the hospital waiting rooms fill up,
00:00:42.640 and right on cue with the arrival of the fall flu season,
00:00:46.720 come the impassioned pleas for a return to universal, point-of-a-gun,
00:00:51.840 full weight-of-the-law, mandatory masking. And if you don't, you're a social path.
00:00:58.000 Seriously, if you don't care to cover your face, you're a sociopath.
00:01:03.440 That's what they think, at the Globe and Mail anyway,
00:01:05.600 where columnist Marsha Lederman was emoting this week.
00:01:08.560 She wrote,
00:01:09.360 Waits at emergency rooms, especially at children's hospitals, not just in Ontario,
00:01:15.040 are unsustainably lengthy, at times forcing people to wait in the parking lot.
00:01:20.800 Hearing those on the front lines, healthcare workers, parents tell it,
00:01:25.040 the system feels like it is teetering, close to collapse.
00:01:29.760 It's terrifying!
00:01:30.960 Well, first things first.
00:01:34.080 Ms. Lederman also complains that anti-maskers can be belligerent.
00:01:38.800 If they are, they need to lighten up. It's a free world.
00:01:43.040 If somebody wants to mask up, let them, and then leave them alone.
00:01:48.640 However, as far as all the emotional gut-helper stuff goes,
00:01:52.160 Health Canada just doesn't agree with her.
00:01:54.960 According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, who are the number keepers for all things COVID in Canada,
00:02:00.560 hospital bed use by COVID-19 patients was actually down the week Lederman wrote her Pearl Clutcher.
00:02:07.440 Take a look.
00:02:09.600 Between November the 9th, 2022, and November the 16th, 2022,
00:02:15.520 the total number of hospital beds occupied by COVID-19 patients decreased from 6100 to 5700.
00:02:23.840 The number of non-ICU beds occupied by COVID-19 patients decreased from 5800 to 5400.
00:02:31.440 The number of ICU beds occupied by COVID-19 patients decreased from 268 to 252.
00:02:39.680 The number of COVID-19 patients who are mechanically vented decreased from 116 to 105.
00:02:47.040 It's actually been dropping off since the middle of October.
00:02:50.880 That's one thing.
00:02:52.240 Now, here's one more thing from the very same Public Health Agency of Canada's site.
00:02:57.280 More Canadians have died from COVID this year than either 2020 or 2021.
00:03:03.840 Truly.
00:03:04.800 Let me show you.
00:03:05.680 See these slides.
00:03:06.480 At the end of both 2020 and 2021, Canada's chief medical officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, issued statements on how COVID had gone that year.
00:03:16.880 In round numbers, she said 50,500 people died of COVID in 2020, and at the end of 2021, nearly 15,000 more.
00:03:25.120 This year, so far, nearly 17,000.
00:03:28.800 Sure, the larger part was at the turn of the year, to be sure.
00:03:32.320 But if you're under 70, let me just give you some reassurance.
00:03:35.600 82% of the 47,000 Canadians who have died since March 2020 were people over 70.
00:03:43.680 Poor old sods like me, then.
00:03:45.200 But unlike me, having something else wrong with them.
00:03:48.240 Bottom line, for all the masks and the vaccines, the social distancing, the lockdowns, and in Quebec,
00:03:54.160 months of overnight curfews, none of it seems to have made much difference.
00:03:59.120 This damn COVID virus seems to do what it wants, which, by the way, is also pretty much the way
00:04:04.000 influenza virus consistently operates.
00:04:07.200 By the way, in 2018, flu did to the hospital system what Marsha Letterman says COVID is doing to it now.
00:04:15.360 Here's how Time magazine reported it then.
00:04:18.080 It said the 2017-18 influenza epidemic is sending people to hospitals and urgent care
00:04:23.920 centres in every state, and medical centres are responding with extraordinary measures,
00:04:29.280 asking staff to work overtime, setting up triage tents, restricting friends and family visits,
00:04:34.960 and cancelling elective surgeries.
00:04:37.440 A big deal then.
00:04:38.560 And it was the same here.
00:04:39.680 Ask anybody who you know who works in a hospital, they'll tell you.
00:04:43.280 But masking, you'll notice, was not among the extraordinary measures recommended
00:04:48.560 to deal with the flu five years ago, nor was sending children home from schools.
00:04:53.440 Funny they didn't think of that five years ago.
00:04:56.560 So why is it that the first thing that the Globe and Mail thinks of now,
00:05:00.640 the Globe and Mail and, frankly, so many other people who are joining the mask-up bandwagon,
00:05:05.920 probably because it's an easy thing to say.
00:05:08.080 It sounds community-minded, and calling people you actually look down on a little,
00:05:12.480 sociopaths, makes you feel so righteous.
00:05:15.520 Well, fire away, Globesters. 1.00
00:05:17.440 Now you're getting paid by the government.
00:05:19.200 We wouldn't expect you to say anything different.
00:05:22.400 As for us, we'll go with Health Canada's numbers.
00:05:26.160 And they don't say what you're saying.
00:05:30.720 For the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford.
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