The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - A Good News Bad News Kind Of Day

Episode Date: November 17, 2020

More catch up on everything from books to vaccines to airlines.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with the latest episode of the Bridge Daily. It's Tuesday of week 36. This was an interesting day. I had another speech today, virtual speech. Alberta. The Alberta Public School Boards Association. So it was a good chance to talk to some of the people who were elected to look after school boards in Alberta

just like they are in school boards in other parts of the country as well, and this being a tough year, right, for everyone, especially for those people who are trying to make decisions about how their school should operate, the impact on kids, the impact on teachers, the impact on parents.

Anyway, we talked about a number of things, and it was a good discussion. I gave a speech and then took questions for about, I don't know, it seemed like a half an hour, a lot of questions. I also wanted to know about the book. So I want to say a couple of things about the book. It's been a week now, went on sale a week ago today,

and all indications it's been a good run on book sales. We'll find out, I guess, later this week whether it makes that top ten list of bestsellers in the country. We'll know that soon. And that'll always be interesting to hear. What was funny here is I told the audience in Alberta the same thing I've told those of you and some of you who are in Alberta on the podcast is that if you purchase a book because I can't get there to sign it, I'll sign a bookplate sticker and mail it out to them. Anyway, so

people were apparently sitting there watching this speech on their laptops or desktops in offices around Alberta while they were also going online and buying the book, which was terrific, right? getting emails at the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com asking for book plates and showing their little receipts where they've bought the book. So it's funny. There have been so many of you who've written in since I first mentioned this last week, the end of last week. And I had, I don't know, hundreds of these stickers. I've now had to order more because I'm down to the last couple.

So if you end up sending something following this podcast, don't expect to get anything in a hurry because I've got to wait until I get a new load of stickers. But you will get it eventually, all right? In the meantime, those of you, everybody who has written so far, uh, your response is already in the mail. So, um, hopefully, uh, you'll get it. And some, I don't know how the mail service is working. Um, seems to be okay. You'll be getting it soon. Um, a reminder, um reminder where you can get the book

because I was asked to mention this again listen it's Simon & Schuster it's one of the leading publishers in the world and you can get the book pretty well anywhere you see or buy books obviously at the main

chains Indigo, and this includes online, Indigo, Amazon, Costco, Walmart. Costco's giving a big push on the book. They're doing a story on me in their next month's Costco magazine. So that's nice. Anyway, that's the kind of headlines on the book for today.

Now, it's called, if you haven't heard, it's called Extraordinary Canadians. Okay. And you can find it at any of those places online or in the actual stores. Now, if you recall, I've got a mixture of stuff today. Some good news, some difficult news. So let's start with the relatively good news. You may recall in, I guess it was a month or two months ago, when the season started to turn and down south, down under, they were turning from summer to winter, the opposite of us, right?

And so they had their first studies on how the seasonal flu vaccine had done there. And they said it was great. Their cases, number of cases was way down. And they attributed that to the fact that most people were operating to protect themselves against COVID-19. So there was already a lot of mask wearing, social distancing, avoiding crowds, washing hands, all those things, watching what they touch. And as a result, they said, that's why.

Not just the vaccine, but the way people were behaving was so much better to prevent the seasonal flu. So anyway, in the last month or so, seasonal flu vaccines have been way ahead of usual here in Canada. It's been a little over a month, I think, that the flu shots have been given out, and whether you get it at your doctor's or your pharmacy or wherever you get the flu vaccine.

And the first numbers are in for Canada. And you know what? It's a similar kind of pattern. Because at this point, during last year's flu season, and now once again it's early, but still, at this point last year, there were 711 positive cases of influenza, the seasonal flu. 711 by this point last year. So what do you think they've got this year so far? 17. 17.

I don't know. I can't do the math that fast in my head, but that sounds like somewhere around 1% or 1.5% of where we were last year at this point. So that's good news. But, of course, it's the other virus that is the big issue, the coronavirus, COVID-19, which is raging all across the country, except in the really well-organized Atlantic bubble,

and hopefully it stays that way for Atlantic Canada. Okay, moving on. You know the news we had yesterday about Moderna, the vaccine, and how promising that may be. There's one thing that we didn't talk about yesterday that we should have, which gives Moderna the advantage over Pfizer. They're both apparently, on the initial testing, seem to be really solid vaccines.

Pfizer has an efficacy rate, they call it, just over 90%. Moderna has almost 95%. And those are really unheard of, as we said yesterday, unheard of numbers for a vaccine in terms of its efficiency. But here's the difference between the two. Pfizer is the one that has to be kept at temperatures like way below zero, right? I think it's minus 70. So, and you got to move it around, right? You've got to transport it from city to city and from office to office

and keeping it at that temperature. And you've got to have two shots. 28 days apart. Moderna's vaccine, on the other hand, could be the game changer, not only because of its efficiency rate, is its stability in ordinary refrigerator temperatures, which, of course, makes moving this stuff around, the distribution, that much easier.

Now, I'm not sure whether you still need two shots with Moderna or whether it's just done in one. Some of these are a one-shot shot. The others are a two-shot shot. So you've got to decide where you go to get your shot. Sounds like a song from Hamilton. Anyway, those are all things to keep in mind about vaccines. But the main thing to keep in mind about vaccines is don't expect anything soon. We're going to be going through this awful winter

before any of us are likely to see a vaccine. If we're really lucky, within the next couple of months, our frontline health care workers are going to get the vaccine. Maybe some people in long-term care facilities are going to get the vaccine. Maybe some people in long-term care facilities are going to get the vaccine. Those are the hopes at this point. Moving on. This is kind of, well, these stories are discouraging. You know, there's all this talk about avoiding big crowds

and don't go to social gatherings. And what is it anyway on the part of people who organize big social gatherings? Don't they get it? Like, have they not figured this out yet? That this is a breeding ground and it can happen quickly. I mean, you just have to look at the White House, see how that's happened. But there are more examples. Listen to this one.

This comes from the LA Times. People are reasonable to be worried and nervous about the upcoming holidays. As a Los Angeles Times article demonstrates. Just how easy it is for viral infections to arrive at gatherings and then spiral out of control, out of hand. At a small wedding this past summer, only 55 people attended. Okay, so you've got a wedding, a small one in LA, 55 people attended the wedding. But someone arrived who had COVID-19, and they spread it to other

guests, who then took it home with them, eventually sickening 176 others. So we had 55 at the wedding. One person has COVID, at least one, spreads it in that room of 55. They go home. And another 176 others are not only exposed, they're sickened. They end up testing positive. And of that group, this is the clincher to this story, of that group, seven people died.

Guess how many were at the wedding? None. All right? Not one of them had been at the wedding. That's how this explodes out, right? You have the social gathering. There's a problem there already, but the problem expands as soon as all those people leave the wedding,

and it starts crunching away, infecting others. And some people die. In this case, seven. None of whom had been at the wedding. This story bothered me. Because this is really not what we want to see happen. This one's in the New York Times. So it's a study about doctors in the United States.

The New York Times is reporting that thousands of doctors are calling it quits under stress of the pandemic and medical practices are closing up as medical workers in smaller offices such as pediatric practices decide to retire early or shift to less intense jobs. It's been difficult for many offices to be profitable as families have stayed away fearful of catching the virus at the doctor's office. And the shift to telemedicine hadn't been adopted quickly or comfortably enough for these offices.

We can't. We can't let that happen. I don't know whether it's happening in Canada. I'll talk to a few of my friends who are doctors, see what they're hearing. But if the pandemic is going to drive people away from the medical practice, that's not a good thing. Not a good thing at all. I saw some statistics in an area which you know that I love talking about. Five, four, three, two, one. That's right, you guessed it, the airline business. And I've been actually kind of waiting for these numbers.

I mentioned them when I saw some very partial numbers. But once again, this is just for the states because they release data a lot more often, I think, than we do. They've released the data on the number of people who are going through airports through the security checks. They do that on a daily basis. Every day they tell you how many people, or they count up how many people, went through the system all over the United States. And they give you a second figure, which is how many people went on the same day a year ago. So these aren't shocking. These are kind of what you might expect,

seeing as airports basically shut down and airlines basically shut down and airlines basically shut down in the midst of the, at the beginning of the pandemic and they're struggling to survive. So where is the struggle today? So I'm going to give you the latest up-to-date numbers. You'll be very impressed. Back last spring, it all started in the middle of March when people started to say,

I'm not going anywhere, but a lot of people had to get back to wherever they were coming from. So there was still some travel in the end of March, beginning of April. But by April 14th, that was a Tuesday. This was the worst day in the past year. Actually, probably a lot longer, but in terms of the pandemic, this was the worst day. Tuesday, April 14th. Went through the whole system in the United States, 87,534 people went through security.

87,534. For the same day one year before, so in other words, April 14th, 2019, 2,208,688. 2.2 million versus 87,000. And at that point, you could see very clearly that this was going to be a disaster for the airline industry on every possible front, whether it was airport staff,

whether it was captains and co-pilots, flight attendants, ground maintenance staff, ticketing staff, the engineering staff, the technical staff, people who service the aircraft, service industries like meals, you name it. Because at that point, most people realized this was going to be around for a while. I had airline executives tell me last April or May, it was going to be three to four years before they get back to any sense of normalcy in terms of flights.

So where are we 36 weeks later? What do the numbers look like now? Well, funny you ask. I can answer that question. Last day recorded, or at least the last day I have access to, was Sunday, two days ago, November 15th. Keep in mind that that day in April, that Tuesday in April, was 87,000, right?

So where are we today in what appears to be the midst of the second wave, certainly the front end of the second wave? Actually, the numbers are pretty impressive. 978,297. So about, you know, roughly 900,000 more people traveled on Sunday than did on April 14th, the worst day of this for travel by air. But 978,000 compares to what a year ago on that day, November 11th, 2019.

Well, here's the answer to that. 2.396, so 2,396,681 people traveled that day. So roughly 2.4 million versus 1 million. So we're not at 50% yet, but we're a lot closer to 50% than we were back in April. So those are the stark numbers. Nobody's jumping up and down and dancing in the airline business, not yet. And they're still saying it's going to be a while. The vaccine may change everything, but that's not going to be changed before another year. So be careful about how high you put your hopes in the vaccine.

It's a great thing to know it's coming, but it's going to be a while. It's going to be a while. All right. I just got one more, and this is a hard one. You know, I have trouble reading this when I first saw it, and I haven't read it since, so I don't know what will happen when I'm reading it now. ProPublica

is a pretty good news organization in the States. I have a health reporter by the name of Caroline Chen. She's got a very strongly worded piece in ProPublica right now. And what she's been looking at is, you know, we went through, we, healthcare workers went through such hell in the spring. And now it's happening again.

And perhaps in numbers even higher. Well, definitely in some places way higher. So what she wanted to do was look at what she calls the enraging deja vu of this repeated COVID-19 wave. She was and is exhausted and infuriated to hear the same things happening over and over again, especially with healthcare workers struggling, suffering, and burning out amid heavy psychological toll.

She quotes a chief medical officer. And this is the quote. This is the quote she got. You watch patients who are young and who should have had good lives die without their families by them and their families being distraught. And then you go out through your community and you see people partying.

You see people partying. That is so difficult. Now that image of what they faced, young kids, I mean, we hear about similar situations with older people, and we keep being told by whom. That young people, oh, it's not a big deal for young people. Well, it's a big deal if you've got it. And it's a big deal if you're unable to fight it. And it's a big deal

if the nurses and doctors who are looking after you are in tears doing so. Because they're watching young people who had good lives ahead of them die without their families even being able to be beside them. And their families so distraught on the outside, knowing what was happening to their children. And then that same nurse or doctor goes out, leaves the hospital on after a long shift, goes out through the community and sees people en masse partying, socializing, not wearing masks, Ignoring the guidelines.

Ignoring the restrictions. In some cases, ignoring the rules, the law that's being put in place. Yep. I don't know how they deal with it. You hear that story and then you hear the other story about some people in the medical practice just getting out of it because of the stress. They can't deal with it anymore. It's one thing to be in difficulty on business

because people aren't coming to your practice, but it's another thing to get out because of the stress. All right. I told you it was kind of a mixed bag, and you know I don't like to go into the, you know, the dwelling on the negatives, which is easy to do. There's so much negativity around this story. I try to keep positive, but every once in a while you see something

or you hear something that is really, really depressing, and that is one of them. Okay. Okay. But we're going to chin up and face the music together, as we have been doing for 36 weeks now. And we'll remember. And I have to keep reminding myself I'm not perfect on this front.

I got to keep reminding myself, put on your mask. Wash your hands. Wash your hands. Keep your distance. Avoid the crowds. Be smart. Be healthy. Be wise. Stay calm and stay kind.

All right, we're going to leave it at that for today. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks for listening. This has been The Bridge, and you know it, we'll be back in 24 hours. Thank you.