The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Are We Losing Our Resolve in the Fight Against Covid?

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

Today's regular Monday look at where we are in the fight against COVID involves our discussion this week with Edmonton's Dr. Lynora Saxinger from the University of Alberta.  But first my thoughts on the weekend of protest on mandates.  And of course, a last thought on the weekend's NFL games.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. Are we losing our resolve against COVID? That and a lot more, right after this. And welcome to yet another week in the life of the bridge. It's Monday, and as we always do on Monday, we try to bring you up to date on the COVID story with one of our great epidemiologists in this country. Boy, we're lucky to have the people we have, and especially we're lucky at the bridge to have those who agree to come on here every Monday from different parts of the country give us their take on what we're witnessing. Before we get to that, a couple of comments from me about the weekend in Ottawa. And I'm not going to dwell on this, but let me go over a couple of things.

The good news was there was no violence, at least that I'm aware of, no significant violence of any kind. The bad news is there was everything but, and there was some ugly stuff. You know, I mean, think about it. Some of these protesters draped placards and flags and signs advocating their protest on the Terry Fox statue. Really? Really? Somebody, at least one person, urinated at the National War Memorial.

Somebody danced on the tomb of the unknown soldier at the War Memorial. now you know a few thousand people and a handful of trucks did turn up and they blocked down town ottawa for the weekend and apparently still are to some degree today now i've been on parliament hill for protest rallies and for celebrations. I know what a crowd looks like, a real crowd. You know, on Canada Day, there's usually somewhere around 20,000 to 30,000. I've seen as many as 50,000 people on the Parliament Hill. And you know there are 50,000 when both those big lawns in front of the Parliament buildings, in front of the Peace Tower, are packed, and it flows out onto the street on Wellington Street, and it's packed.

That's what a real crowd looks like. This was, you know, I mean, it was certainly better than a handful. But I don't know. The police haven't given their estimate yet on how big the crowd was at its biggest moment. I'd say somewhere between three, maybe tops 5,000 people. That's still a lot of people, and they were making their case on whatever their case was. I'm still not quite sure. When you listen to some of these people, they're all over the map.

It supposedly started as a protest against the vaccine mandate for truckers coming into Canada, going out of Canada. Same mandate, both sides of the border, right? Both in Canada and the US.

And 90% of truckers are already vaccinated anyway. But having said that, they had their little rally. And they caused enormous problems, you know, within the city of Ottawa. And the mayor last night saying enough already. Yeah, we spend tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers of Ottawa for their city to be kept in some degree of order. Well, they're not getting their money's worth. Nobody's doing anything. There's no attempt to move these people out peacefully, out of the downtown core. Yet, that may be happening today.

I'm sure there are plans. You can bet the police and various security forces have plans on how to do that. And they're just waiting for somebody to say, do it. The people certainly seem to want, do it. The people certainly seem to want to do it. But the list goes on about stuff that happened in these last couple of days. Somebody broke into a food shelter for the homeless, demanded food and shelter.

There's garbage everywhere in downtown Ottawa. It's just kind of like dumped. And I use the term garbage carefully because there's everything, everything you can imagine. You know, what was supposed to happen at these protest rallies? There were speeches. There were speeches. I don't recognize those who were giving the speeches,

with the exception of, you know, the twice-defeated leader of a party that has no representation of the House of Commons, the People's Party, Max Bernier, gave a speech to some of the protesters. That was their big draw. The twice-defeated leader of a party that has no seats. They did attract a few conservative MPs, I think two, one of whom had to put out a statement

a couple of hours later saying he didn't like Nazis. Now, why did he have to do that? Because when he went out and gave TV interviews, there was some guy behind him who he says he didn't know anything about, who was holding a flag with swastikas all over it.

Freedom. This was a freedom rally with swastikas, people urinating at the National War Memorial. This was freedom. This was freedom for the taxpayers of Ottawa. I don't know. I hope they think they got their case made. I don't know how this is going to end.

I assume it'll end at some point I see a lot of people kind of disappeared between Saturday and Sunday and I assume even more so today but those trucks at least first thing this morning were still there

alright were still there. All right. That's how I feel about it. You know, there were support rallies in support of the Ottawa protests in different parts of the country, and the biggest one was in Alberta. This is interesting. On Saturday, Premier Jason Kenney of Alberta was supportive of the cause

for the truckers' rally because it seemed like it was just in Ottawa and no love lost there. Well, by yesterday, down at Cootes, Alberta, right on the border with the U.S., they'd blocked the border. And now Jason Kenney was going, oh, you can't do that. Not here. So he's all upset now.

Saying you can't block the border. It's going to stop traffic. And it's going to stop trade. Trade from the truckers, the 90% of whom are vaccinated, who are trying to get in to Canada or out of Canada with their goods. They can't get out because of the protest at Coutts. Okay, I'm rambling. Let's get into let's get into covid which we'll do on Mondays here on The Bridge,

which you're listening to on SiriusXM Canada, Channel 167 Canada Talks, or with your favorite podcast platform. As we always do on Mondays, we kind of break down where we are on the story, on the COVID story, on the pandemic story. And we do it with the help of some of the country's best known epidemiologists. And you know that we have them in, our regulars are in Halifax, Toronto, Hamilton, and Edmonton, Alberta. And it's Edmonton where we're going today because we haven't talked to Dr. Saxinger,

Dr. Lenora Saxinger, for, well, for some time. I guess it was late last year was the last time we talked. Dr. Saxinger is a professor at the, associate professor at the University of Alberta, Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases. And she's not just a lecturer, she's a practicing physician and has been involved at all levels on this story. And we're extremely grateful for having some time with her. So let's get right to it.

Find out her view on where we're at on this story. Here we go. So how would you describe where we are right now in this battle against COVID? You know, it's interesting that you use the word battle because I actually do feel like people are battle weary. You know, you're strapping on the armor, heft in the sword and waiting in again. And with that, I actually think I'm just perceiving that across the board, everyone is tired inside

healthcare and inside society at large. And so it also makes me think a little bit about wars because, you know, you know, world war II went on for quite a number of years. And at some point in the midpoint, it must've felt kind of like this, like, is this over yet? And, and, and the only thing that I actually last year at this time, we had the vaccines and I think that my outlook was a lot more positive at that time than was really warranted now we're at this phase and I think I'm seeing that you know strategy is going to be the thing to get us out of out of the battles and and the strategy is going to have

to evolve and so so I kind of feel like there's more uncertainty now in a way than last year at this time. That's funny because you're right. I mean, we were so kind of anxious and positive a year ago because of vaccines that we didn't realize there was still a struggle ahead. But could it be conversely now that we're, you know, we're more uncertain, more possibly negative than we should be? Yeah, that's a real risk. Because, you know, when I tried to think about what could happen next, there's the majority of the situations that I imagine actually see us having this last push and things being in a better place in one way or another. Even, you know, four to six months into this year, I think things could be looking much better. Of course, whenever you say anything like that, you feel like you're a tempting fate. But the fact is, at the end of this surge,

most people will have been vaccinated, infected, or both. And so it's going to be a different landscape for the virus. And we also have some really promising developments in the vaccine world that I think offer some glimmers of kind of longer range hope too so so in my mind I still can't help thinking that this next little while is crucial but beyond that I think it's going to be a different game and I think it's going to be a more livable game but we can't let our guard down like we can't actually say we're done with it and stop doing things. That's the wrong strategy. The strategy is to continue and to adjust as the virus adjusts.

And I think that public health has been trying to do that. The population is at varying stages of acceptance of where things are at and where things might go um but we really do have to just kind of roll up our sleeves because i think it's going to get better what exactly it looks like there's a few different things that could happen i suppose like well you know there's a lot of discussion i think the term gets um gets kind of it seems to carry a different understanding depending on who says it. But the idea of endemicity where, you know, for many years, people in health care have known that there can be severe outcomes from respiratory viruses.

Now, not like COVID. So COVID might serve some different kind of issues. But influenza, it's not analogous, but it's similar enough that you can imagine that we would have fairly widespread infection. And then you try to identify and mitigate the severe effects on a certain group of people. And we do that with influenza. We also do that with respiratory syncytial virus, RSV, which affects kids and puts kids in hospital every year. And so will this end up being one of a menu of viruses that we have to try to anticipate, manage and protect against, but without necessarily the, you know, large scale and extreme measures that we've had to use so far to save lives. And I think that's quite likely. I think that the potential challenges will end up being in trying to reduce the risk of new and, you know, continued different challenges from variants and trying to really deal with the societal schisms that are really messing up our response. And so, you know,

between those two things, there's lots left to do, but none of it is impossible. And I think that the other thing that we have that we didn't have for some of these other viruses is actually the potential for pretty useful therapeutics, so that, you know, even if a variant comes along, if we can keep it contained, keep a lid on it, we have a much better chance at reducing the risk for individual people, if we can thoughtfully deploy these medications, but you know, we're not quite there yet. So there's a whole bunch of things that I think, mean that it's going to look different, and it's going to look different in a way that reads as being a lot more normal for people. At the same time, I'm afraid of going back to normal, because I think that we've learned some

things that we shouldn't accept our previous normal normal and we should try to rebuild things to to prevent future problems but you know that the everyday life kind of normal i think is attainable but right now that's a message that we have to kind of keep balanced because we're not there right now we still have to really do the things to to to try to contain stuff until the hospitals and the health care system have have kind of dealt with the current surge that's the fear for some people in different parts of the country that we're you know there's this sense that we've passed the worst of omicron we saw the peak it's plateaued it's on its way down and therefore we can start pulling back on the restrictions and in fact they start pulling back on the restrictions.

And in fact, they are pulling back on restrictions in many different parts of the country. And the fear, of course, is that here we go again. We're moving back too quick. No, it's one thing that I think people have to think about when they look at that shape of case numbers that goes up and comes down, is that when you look at those curves, there's as many cases on the way down as there were on the way up. And there is a delay before people come into hospital. And that we probably haven't crested in hospital yet, which is horrible. You know, it's really difficult right now. And I think that,

you know, taking your eye off the prize too early is something that I think we should learn from earlier parts of the pandemic too. So after things go up and come down, is that a good sign? Yes. Is it a sign that we can just say, hey, we're done? Absolutely not. But, you know, I think there's going to be a thoughtful way and a data-informed way to maneuver over the next little while. And I do think people do need to have some hope extended, like this is not going to be an interminable issue. But lay out the steps, lay out, you know, what data points and what things you'll be looking at.

But I really, I feel very anxious when I hear decision makers make promises in a situation where we actually really don't know what's going to happen. So if you give a promise and a deadline, it's hard to draw back. But if you just promise that you're going to be transparent in the decision making that you're going to use data, and these are the data points you're going to use, I think that you can actually get people on side and keep people on side as long as they know it's not forever and as long as they know that the decision is being made weighing important things and so I really do have have anxiety when I kind of hear promises about things being done at certain times because we really don't know exactly what will happen. We can try to predict. But it's a fool's game to try to actually make decisions on future data, I would have to say.

So I do worry about that. But on the other hand, you know, once things have come to a peak, we ordinarily do expect that they will come down. When we look at what's going on in other places, I would say one observation that I keep on getting a bit hung up on is when you look at the UK cases, they had a short, sharp peak. It was pretty violent. They had one in 20 people infected, documented on survey at different points, even higher in some populations, just massive. With that, they had a tremendous surge in hospital and their healthcare system has seen that strain. You see the case rates coming down beautifully, but you see those hospitalization rates are kind of more sustained than the case rates. And I actually look at that and I think, you know what, the virus is finding the susceptible,

the virus is finding the vulnerable. And so even though most of the population is now protected, those people who are not fully vaccinated or have, you know, have had a suboptimal response to vaccine and remain at risk are the ones who are still getting infected and still coming into hospital. So I think we have to think about that a little bit because the shape is not as reassuring in some places as others. And I think that there is some risk we could see something like that here. So the one thing that I feel is kind of missing a little bit is, although we're all talking about the booster doses, I think the focus on that and the intensity around encouraging that might be missing. Like I was on call last week and I saw quite a few patients with COVID, of course. And a lot of them had actually beautifully gotten their two doses, but I genuinely don't think they realized how important the third dose is right now.

And they're in hospital because they thought they were protected after two. But, you know, the protection after two is definitely worth it. But the protection after three is way better. So, you know, if you reduce your risk of hospitalization by two-thirds with two doses, you reduce it more like high 80s to 90% with three. That's a big difference, and it's landing a lot of people in hospital. And so there's a big to-do list, I think, but everyone's tired. Everyone's tired, and it leaves you wondering whether we're losing our our resolve and i don't mean i don't mean health care workers i i don't even mean government officials i i mean it's kind of like we the people are are we losing our resolve you see

different extremes you saw stuff over the weekend obviously with the you know protests and and this and that but just the ordinary you know man or woman who has been pretty committed on this you know battle for the last two years there seems to be this sense that there's kind of a a losing of resolve but just kind of had it yeah i i definitely perceive that in everywhere honestly and and you know it's interesting there's some people have just been so good so quietly awesome this entire time and i even perceive that some of those people are kind of feeling you know what's the point i think that part of it might just be that people have gotten kind of dismayed by the the numbers in the last search. Like everyone did everything that they were supposed to do all along.

And then we just got hammered by Omicron in terms of numbers. And so it's really, you know, it does make you start to question whether everything was worth it. And maybe that's another thing we should try to elevate. Because if you think about it, if you actually even just do, you know, envelope math, the number of lives saved by the actions everyone has taken so far is amazing. But you know, the successes in public health tend to be very silent. So you only see the burden, you don't see the results. And so I think that, you know, the number of lives saved by the combinations of non-pharmaceutical data, which is freely available, you see that people do modulate what they're doing still in response to the numbers. So there, there still is a stalwart core, I think,

but I think the fatigue is across the board. And I really do believe some people have just kind of like, it's everywhere. You know, we can't, we can't do anything about it. And in fact, it is everywhere, but we can't do things about it. We still have to, we have to change how we're thinking about what we need to do, but it's not just throwing the towel. But that's hard. It's hard because there's a lot of exhaustion. And I think the increasing divisiveness is also very dispiriting to people.

So people are starting to check out a little bit. You mentioned earlier variants and they're always going to be variants um you know some obviously more difficult uh than most and we've just you know we're dealing with the one in omicron and before that delta um there is this appearance of the ba2 which is a kind of from the omicron family there have been a there have been a number of them detected in Alberta, where you are, but also in Ontario and other parts of the country. Not a lot yet, but Omicron didn't start with a lot. It started with just a couple here, a couple there, and then boom,

almost overnight it went viral, so to speak. But I detect when I'm listening to people the experts talk about BA2 that you know they're concerned about its transmissibility but in the big picture they don't seem to be that too concerned about it. Yeah you have to you have to be really careful what you say about uh about these things because you know we really do need time to see patterns it does really look like and actually we're kind of fortunate albert honestly because our regular screening hasn't been validated yet but really does appear to pick this up well so we will be able to watch b2 does appear to be able to dominate over the original omicron strain and i think the piece that's missing right now is whether that really means anything or not.

So, you know, is it just the new flavor of Omicron and we're going to see the same high transmissibility and the same kind of characteristics in terms of severity of illness? And one thing there is, of course, people who are susceptible, people who are under- under vaccinated or unvaccinated um they still still get severe disease i think there's been some messaging issues around that like they think oh it's not severe i'm like well if you get it it's still severe um but you know it's not yet clear whether it's going to mean anything different on an epidemiologic basis except for that it is replacing omicron. If we started seeing really true secondary surges on top of Omicron, especially in people who've previously had Omicron,

then yeah, I think that we need to be cautious. But at the moment, I'm not sure that it's worth doing anything different for because what do we need to do? We need to continue to be judicious about spending time with each other. We need to continue to isolate the symptoms. We need to continue to be judicious about spending time with each other. We need to continue to isolate the symptoms. We need to continue to really try to maximize the vaccination

across the population. And so the messaging is not different. And I am, you know, as I said, encouraged that we will be able to follow this closely enough. I guess that's one of the things I think that goes with the earlier comment about being prepared to act with data is that, you know, having being a little bit light on your feet when you're saying what's going to happen and being able to respond when things are changing and being quite limber about it is how we will continue to go forward, I think most productively. And so being ready to say, well, we don't know about this yet, but at such a time as it looks like it's a threat,

we might have to change our response I think is a very appropriate message. I don't think it's anything to panic about right now. And people are a little tuned towards hearing about a new variant and feeling deep despair about it. And I don't think that we need to do that. I think we just need to be cautious and prudent and smart and strategic. It's like, I said this to someone last week, it's like playing chess. It makes a move, we make a move. It's making a move. We don't really know the significance of it yet. And we have to be ready to counter it in the best way possible. I think we'll leave it at that. Dr.

Saxinger, as always, you know, we appreciate your time. It's been a little while since you and I have talked. I'm glad we've had this opportunity. Wish you luck with the challenges that are facing you. And like everybody else, I hope you're managing to get some time to yourself and to your friends and family. I know that for most of you, this is just a non-stop job for the last couple of years with very little time to rest, but we appreciate you taking this opportunity to talk with us. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. Dr. Lenora Saxinger in Edmonton talking to us.

She's at the University of Alberta, as well as working in any number of different wards on the COVID story. And so always a pleasure to get her thoughts on all this as well as the other epidemiologists we talk to in different parts of the country. She actually, we talked a little bit also about the situation for the kids from like zero to four.

And I've saved that. I may run it later this week because it's a couple of minutes. It's interesting. I know for a lot of parents who are waiting on the decision about whether or not their kids are going to be able to get a vaccine. It's an important discussion, and any time there's information, it's good for them. All right, that almost wraps it up for today, but I did want to mention one other thing.

If you were with us last Monday, you know that I talked a little bit about the NFL, the football games on the weekend, which were unbelievable last weekend. And you know what? They were again this weekend. Games that went right down to the wire to determine who's going to end up in the Super Bowl. Now, everybody thought that it was sort of like a walk in the park. Not everybody, but a lot of people thought it was going to be a walk in the park for the Kansas City Chiefs, who've been in the last two Super Bowls,

won one of them, lost last year to Tampa Bay. They were playing the kind of upstart Cincinnati Bengals. And I'm a Cincinnati fan mainly because of Joe Burrow, who's their quarterback, young kid who I watched in college, university in the States, and he's amazing. He's like really quite something. He never, ever loses his cool. I think of him as the guy who's going to become the next Tom Brady.

Anyway, I'm no football expert, but I saw this story about Patrick Mahomes, who until yesterday was considered the best quarterback in the, in the NFL, certainly one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL. But he did not have a good game. He did not have a good second half of the game and they lost. But here's the story that I found interesting about him, and this, I think, could apply to perhaps any of the top-notch quarterbacks. Last weekend, in the big game where they had the comeback and they won, Patrick Mahomes wore a tracker to monitor his heart rate. And you would assume that at the most pressure point parts of a game,

that his heart rate must have been going crazy. But this determines that, in fact, that was not the case. This comes from Axios. He was wearing this heart rate monitor. His peak heart rate, 191 beats per minute, that's obviously high, came during his first quarter touchdown run. So he was running, it was a pressure but you know he was exerting a lot of energy his heart rate went up to 191 but his sustained peak came during the 28 minutes of real

time between the final two minutes of regulation and the game winning score the biggest spikes during that hectic half hour remember that's the game that went into overtime the biggest spikes during that hectic half hour were precipitated by game-changing plays but his heart rate was actually lowest when the pressure was highest achieving flow state in those moments according to his trainer trainer. Now, I found that interesting because I can remember many years ago, for reasons of monitoring my heart rate, I have atrial fibrillation and they were trying to determine exactly the extent of it. But they strapped me to this thing that i have to wear for 48 hours and they got all the readings now i assumed that at 10 o'clock at night when the nationals started and i sitting in the studio live ready to go that that's when my heart rate would be the highest. Well, in fact, that wasn't the case.

It was very calm. It was like, you know, basically a normal heart rate in that moment. In the kind of build-up in the half hour before the program, my heart was, you know, up in the half hour before the program my heart was you know up in terms of numbers but when we went on the air flat not flat lined but it was very calm and so in some ways I don't want to equate myself to a NFL quarterback but calm is what you need in the pressure moments, right? And calm is what he had a week ago. I'm not sure how he did yesterday in the pressure moments

because he did not have a good second half. So I don't know whether they put the tracker on him for yesterday and if they did, whether they're going to release those numbers. It'll be interesting to see the difference, if there was a difference between last week and this week. All right, that's it. That wraps her up for this week, or not this week, for this day. Tomorrow, a special edition on electric vehicles.

We're going to, you know, I was intrigued last week when gm announced its big seven billion dollar retooling of plants and other things that have been going on so i want to check in on that industry and we've got an expert to talk to tomorrow wednesday smoke mirrors and the truth with bruce uh thursday your letters so don't be shy the man's fish podcast at gmail.com and friday of course good talk with chantelle bear and bruce anderson that's it for today i'm peter mansbridge thanks so much for listening we'll talk to you again in 24 hours Thank you.