The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Inside Nova Scotia's Covid Surge

Episode Date: May 4, 2021

The numbers don't sound that big, especially compared to Alberta and Ontario, but for a part of the Atlantic bubble to be in trouble raises eyebrows. Dr Lisa Barrett takes us inside the fight against Covid in NS and it's riveting.Also, a new study on trust in the media has some very interesting numbers.

Hello there, I'm Peter Mansbridge. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge, where today, inside the surge, the COVID surge in Nova Scotia. Like you, I have been so grateful and so thankful for frontline workers during the COVID crisis. Let's just talk about the frontline workers at SickKids, which is one of the world's best children's hospitals. SickKids doctors also work behind the scenes on incredible breakthroughs to help our kids and generations to come. Listen to their inspiring stories in a new season of the popular podcast called SickKids Versus. Each episode explores a major SickKids discovery like, well, a virus fighting super molecule or a cure for hard to treat cancers. Just visit SickKidsFoundation.com slash podcast or search Sick Kids Versus and spell versus VS. So Sick Kids VS.

You'll be amazed at what you learn. And hello again, Peter Mansbridge here with the latest episode of The Bridge. You know, when you look at yesterday's new number from Nova Scotia, new cases of COVID, it's 146. Now, compared to other places in the country, that's not much. There's a fire raging, as they say, in different parts of the country, especially in Alberta, where the new per capita rate on new cases is higher than the national average. It's higher than the national average. It's higher than the Ontario average. It is higher than the American average.

It's not good. But Nova Scotia had been held out as this beacon for the last year and a bit, ever since COVID started. Part of Atlantic Canada and the Atlantic bubble, and they were holding back, and they were doing everything right, and there was much praise, and still is, for the way the Nova Scotians have handled the situation. But in the last two weeks, things have changed in terms of the situation inside Nova Scotia. There is a surge underway. Because while 146 doesn't sound like much,

it sounds a lot higher than single-digit numbers of new cases per day, which was the norm for most of the last year, suddenly now upwards into triple digits. And could it get worse? What is the outlook for Nova Scotia? And what lessons does it hold for the rest of us? So let's go inside the Nova Scotia situation. If you've been following the bridge for the last year,

you know we've been lucky enough with our infectious disease specialists in different parts of the country to have one from Nova Scotia, and that's Dr. Lisa Barrett, who's connected to Dalhousie University but is a player in terms of this fight against the pandemic and she's a definite player inside Nova Scotia. So I've been talking to her off and on the last week and she's like all the other people involved in this, is working like unbelievable hours trying to deal with the situation.

And as she said to me at one point, she said, you know, anybody can work straight for four weeks, and that's the period we're in right now. We got to beat this, and we're going to beat it. She's confident of that. But she's tired. Like all of them are tired. So we talked late last night.

And it is a... Well, I'll let you decide for yourself. I find this a really telling conversation. Not only about the situation there, but about the situation all of us have. Make sure you listen to it right to the end. Something near the end that you'll never forget. All right. Here it is, my conversation with Dr. Lisa Barrett.

So I guess in some ways there's a danger of kind of overstating what's happening in Nova Scotia. I mean, the numbers for Nova Scotia are not good when you consider the last year, but they're nothing like what we're seeing in, you know, some other parts of the country where clearly there is a fire burning. But how do you describe what's happening in Nova Scotia, given the numbers you're looking at right now? To me, this is as bad as it can get without turning into an unmitigatable disaster or an out-of-control situation. There is a significant amount of community spread that's primarily variant disease.

And if we don't get this under control very, very quickly in the first period of time, then we will end up with the weeks and months that every other province has had with it going through not just older populations, but younger people ending up sick and dying. So I think this week is our critical tip point. And this is as close as it comes with the amount of community spread we have before you would see it start to become an uncontrollable change, no matter how much vaccine or testing you put out there. Well, it seems, you know, officials, both government and public health officials like yourself, moved very quickly on a wide scale, but still

you're at a tipping point. Absolutely. And I think I work on a scale these days, a sliding scale of impossible, possible, probable, and likely. And right now, because of the speed of the lockdown and the restrictions, and because of the amount of testing we're doing, and because we've hit a significant number of vaccinations done, I think that in the next four to five days, we will see our numbers plateau and start to drop if we continue to have, you know, 60 to 70% of people doing we're not going to keep control of it. And we won't be able to keep up. We came very close last week to overwhelming contact tracing with public health. Just going into that, if you think you might be a contact stay home version that many provinces are doing.

And once you lose control like that and you can't test all the people you need to, then you have a problem. And we came bitterly close on Thursday and Friday. And we're not quite close on Thursday and Friday, and we're not quite through that part yet. Well, how do, I mean, one of the things that you've conditioned us over most of the last year is that the people of Nova Scotia and people of Atlanta, Canada, for that matter, have been very good at listening to the advice and following the advice and the protocols. Do you gauge that same kind of support right now, now that you're in, you know, crisis mode?

Well, if we just look a little more granularly back at the beginning of the introduction of the restrictions, we didn't go immediately to full lockdown. People thought we did, but we didn't. We restricted some, you know, get togethers by to five to 10 people. We didn't just restrict it to households. We said it was just HRM before we defined that you couldn't move around the province. It took us four to five days to do that. Restaurants closed early, gyms closed early. But those other things around movement in the province came in a little later, not a lot of time, but invariant standard time, not even pandemic standard time, invariant standard time, five days is a long time. And then we've had six days of lockdown, true lockdown now. But don't forget as well, we were at a point where there were cultural activities, 100% occupancy in restaurants right before this happened. Cultural activities where you could have up to 250 people or 400 people in a stadium. Restaurants were full on a Friday night. So it's really hard for people to

go from that, no matter how good they are and how engaged they are, to thinking that they can't even have their best friend couple over on a Friday night. And I think that flip back is not a switch. It's a slide. And I wonder right now, as I still watch rush hour on the highway outside my building, not quite as rushy houry as usual, but still present, I think people are having difficulty flipping their switch. They're sliding their dimmer instead. And I hope they slide it fast enough to get us where we need to go. And the next four days, four or five days, I think will start to tell us that. What has been the tension level, if you will, between the public health officials like yourself and governments? And I ask that carefully because, you know,

when you look around the country, there has been a real level of tension between those two parties in different provinces. We obviously saw it a lot in Ontario and still do to some degree over these last couple of weeks. And we've seen it elsewhere. What's it like there? And just to be clear, I don't work with public health. I work with public health, but I'm not a public health employee, nor a public health officer. I'm an infectious

disease person that kind of has expertise in this, and I collaborate with them a lot. But at least on the groups that I'm a part of, from the very top of the political chain at the premier level downward, that public face of the premier and the public health officer is very consistent. Certainly, I suspect all public health officers and infectious disease doctors like myself would like things to go a smidgen faster over time. But the underlying philosophies haven't grossly differed on most points, I would say. I think some of us would like to see a little more border type work, a little more stringency around that. But otherwise, there hasn't been the same tension, I think, which to your point earlier around hard and fast on the restrictions. There wasn't a lot, you know, there wasn't a four hour delay in the press conference every time it

was a big day on restrictions, because everyone was fighting in the back room in every other province about what was actually going to get announced. And let's all be clear, that's exactly what happens, right? Here, no delays on the press conferences. People knew what we had to do. And people would say on social media, I hope the premier announces that we're shutting things down. Not an uncommon thing to hear. So I don't think there's been as much tension. Is it perfect?

I doubt it. But it's pretty darn aligned. If the oars aren't going in the water at exactly the same time, they're pretty darn close on most of the biggest issues, I think. What's it done to the vaccine situation in terms of the demand for a vaccine? One assumes like when things start to look bad, everybody wants a vaccine like right now. What's been happening on that front? So the uptake has been good all along. Appointments get filled. There have been a couple of days when there have been, I think from what I see on the public face, there's been a few days of slow uptake. But for the most part, people are getting their vaccines and they're waiting in line. They're obviously, you know, there have been lots of lobby groups in Canada around immunocompromised groups, around pregnant women, around people with Down syndrome, different groups of individuals, people in corrections.

Some of us have been very keen to get those folks vaccinated. They've held the course on age and people are going, okay. But also we've been pretty clear that vaccines can't get you out of a peak. Vaccines help you make sure you don't have another one. Vaccines do not get you out of a wave peak. Testing, staying home and restrictions do. So I don't think people have been clamoring much more quickly, to be honest. I haven't seen that. How is this possible? We're all going to die because we don't have vaccine, at least in the public domain so far in the groups that I've been associated with on social media? On the one hand, I don't know whether optimistic or hopeful is the right word to describe the way you're looking

at this next four or five days. But you do sound like you think that things are in place to get through this, and the attitudes are the right ones on the part of everybody involved, from the public to government to those who are working to try and prevent all this from happening. Would that be the description that you're hopeful? There's nothing guaranteed here, but the signs you see are hopeful ones? I think it's hopeful. I'm a little, I won't lie.

I've had a couple of very disappointed days. I've been very frustrated, not with humans so much. I get human behavior. A little bit frustrated with the virus itself and the fact we could have seen a few things coming and we probably should have been more innovative on a few things. We should have integrated a little more human behavior impact. You can't tell people at the end of a year

not to have graduation parties or not to go out as the weather gets better. We could have mitigated that better, I think. And there's no doubt that there's a small portion of that. We should have engaged other populations of peoples in our communities a little better. And that frustrates me and it makes me sad because I'm seeing 20, 30 and 40 year olds in our hospital. And we've gone from zero patients in hospital for months to almost 40 at a point today in days. So that need not have happened. And that that makes me angry a little bit. But most people are doing the right things. And I think we have a leadership that's willing to listen right now to a lot of

very innovative ideas to get to the next, that thin edge of the wedge, which is so important when you're talking about variant disease. So I'm hopeful not so much that people are going to get it, but that we're going to do a little bit more of that innovative work we need to do in the next few days. You know, you talk about leadership and my last question is actually about leadership. Because if there's one thing I've learned in the years I've been doing work like this is that you learn a lot about leaders in a moment of unexpected crisis. So there's a lot of leaders going through that right now.

And you're a leader. You're definitely a leader in the work you're doing and in the help that you're providing. And I'm wondering what you've learned about yourself through this last two weeks weeks so far anyway. Because, you know, everybody wishes they could do more and wishes they'd seen certain things earlier. But, you know, that is life.

That is what happens. It's how you deal with them when you're faced with it. And I'm wondering, you know, what you've learned about yourself as a leader in these last couple of weeks, if that's not too personal a question to ask. I've reflected on that in the last couple of days. I haven't used the leader word, the L word, but I've looked around because every few days we have done some things that have been fairly innovative here. And when you're doing something on the edge of what people are telling you is not a good thing to do, you really need to reevaluate that over time and not be committed

to the thing, right? Because it could be wrong. You could be doing the wrong thing, or it might become the wrong thing, right? These pop-ups could have become the wrong thing. You need to evaluate. And I've been evaluating over the last couple of days. Not arrogant enough to take ownership of the response, obviously. But, you know, and I think the one thing I've learned about myself is that sometimes in times of stasis or less crisis, I have a, I have a tendency to want to be the partner person. And sometimes I do that a little bit too much. But I also know now about myself that when it has to be done, I'm not so worried about having to be everyone's best

friend and partner. And we need to do some things that are the right thing to do based on 25 years of training. So I've learned that I'm okay, not being the best partner at times for the people working with me, if it means we're doing the right thing at the right time. And I didn't know if that was going to be true. And certainly sometimes during non-crisis times, I tend to head down the partner road and try and be a little more accommodating, but I know that I don't have to be now. And I think that's okay. You know, I said that was the last question and I lied. Oh, good. A couple of weeks ago, I think the last time we talked, I asked you, you know, what you'd heard perhaps from, you know, one of the patients, one of the people in the hospital, something that stuck out in your mind. That was a different time two weeks ago than what you're looking at right now. And I'm sure you're hearing a lot of different things in hospital rooms and on those days when you're in the ICU and you're talking to some of these people. Is there a moment or a conversation that

may help us understand what's going on there. Yeah, so I can't talk to the ICU patients because they're uniformly sedated and intubated. So they're ventilated on a machine and they can't talk. And the two people who are awake looked at me last night as like caged animals. They were very scared and very angry, very upset. One was 22. One was 71. Same response, though. And then I went upstairs to talk to a 25-year-old who had just come into hospital.

And he can't breathe. And he's upstairs on our floor. So that's routine care, because he's not quite sick enough yet to be in either the step up to the ICU or the ICU yet. And he sounds like an 80 year old man and he's a healthy competitive swimmer 25 year old student and he can't get two sentences out on the phone when I'm talking to him from outside the room because I wasn't I wasn't going into his room to see him and I could see him and chat with him and I'm on FaceTime couldn't get two sentences out and he said in this very broken sentence, I have no idea where I got this. I go nowhere. And, of course, he must have gone somewhere or, you know,

chatted with someone or been in contact with someone, and that is a uniform statement. But this is a 25-year-old healthy guy that can't get a sentence out. And he has air hunger so bad, he's terrified. And he has to be in a room by himself without his support people. And again, I come back to the, you know, this really doesn't have to happen if we do all the other right stuff. This now is a preventable disease in a lot of ways, not even just vaccine. And politically, when I know there are hundreds of patients like that in other provinces,

because they don't look at their reproductive number of the virus, their average seven day cases, and there's hundreds of those people, it's very tough. But today, he looked at me, and he got most of a sentence out. And he said, I'll get there. And I said, you'll get there. Let's hope he's doing better again tomorrow and not in the ICU, which often happens at this day plus 10 time points. So let's hope.

It's not a trifling disease. And no one in this country should be sitting in hospital right now just because of poor poor policy decisions which is what a lot of this is not so much here we ran we we ran over things a bit but we'll get there well um i can't think of anybody who would listen to that story and not be not just moved by it but make them think about what exactly is happening um in different parts of this country and clearly sending our you know best not only to that young fellow but to all of those who are in similar situations across the country and to those who are working with them you know people like you like you. So, Dr. Barrett, once again, you know, your time is incredibly valuable,

especially to those people, and that you share a couple of minutes with us every once in a while is something we relish. So, thank you. Always a pleasure, in fact. Well, as I said, you know, not only kind of a gripping interview, laden with facts, but also with emotion and a desire and a hope to be doing the right thing. And trying to help people through what is just a terrible situation. So again, our thanks to Dr. Lisa Barrett, as we offer thanks to all of the different doctors and infectious disease specialists

and experts in different parts of the country who have given us and others in the media the time to try to understand as best we can this story. So thanks to Dr. Lisa Barrett. We're going to take a quick break. Then we're going to change topics. And it's about the media, and it's about trust in the media, something I've talked about before.

I've got some new statistics for you, and I think you'll find them interesting to listen to. So we'll be right back with that right after this. Are you still trying to find ways to get into the world of crypto? Well, look no further. Bitbuy is Canada's number one platform for buying and selling Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Bitbuy has launched a brand new app and website with a new look, lower fees, and new coins. Bitbuy is your one-stop shop to get

involved and super easy to use for beginners. Visit bitbuy.ca or download the Bitbuy app. Enter referral code PODCAST20 to get $20 free when you make your first deposit. And hello again, Peter Mansbridge here. Part of the COVID story is determining who you trust in telling it to you. You know, do you trust the government officials? Do you trust the public health officials? Do you trust the doctors? Do you trust the frontline health care workers? Do you trust the media through which you're getting a lot of the information you make your determinations on?

But how seriously you're going to impact your life with the protocols and the requests from officials to change your lifestyle, whether or not you'll get a vaccine, how you feel about the vaccines. so much of this comes down to what you hear, what you read, what you see. And a lot of that obviously comes through the media. And that could be traditional media, like print, radio, television. It could be new media,

everything from social media to the internet to podcasts. They all have an impact. They're all sort of pumping information your way. So I've talked about this issue about trust in the media before, and the kind of declining value that people place on media of all kinds as to whether or not they're going to believe what they hear and see and read. So I've been watching these numbers, trust numbers, through various different research agencies, both domestic and foreign and international, over the years. And the numbers have been dropping. There's no

question about that. What exactly the last year has done to those numbers is still a little unclear. More people are consuming media, journalism, than before, but are they believing it? Are they trusting it? And what are they watching? Where are they placing their values? Those are all important questions right now and will help determine the future of the media in many ways. Because if we were at a crunch before the pandemic, for lots of different reasons about trust in media, we're going to be in just the same way at the end of this because there will be an end to this all right so where am i leading with this i'm leading to a

new survey that was being put out by the reuters news agent agency in combination with Oxford University in Britain. They've done an extensive worldwide survey. And in terms of the countries, there are about 20 or 30 of them that they've done research polling in. In each place, they've talked to more than 2,000 people. So when you have a survey of that extent, the odds are the numbers are pretty close to the real deal. It's when you start seeing polls or research studies that, you know,

talk to 500 people or 600 people or 400 people, that's when you start to see margins of error increase and you start to have reason to doubt some of the results. But when you're looking at surveys of more than 1,000 and especially more than 2,000, you go, okay, margin of error here is much smaller. It's usually, you know, one or two percentage points, 19 times out of 20. I'd say you have a little more confidence in the numbers. That's not to say I've flipped my position on polls.

I still have issues with polls, especially polls during election campaigns. I'm not big on those. Although, if we have an election campaign this year, you can be sure I'll be talking about them. Anyway, let's get to the results, Mansbridge. The Reuters Oxford study. I'm just going to use three countries as an example and a couple of the questions because I think they kind of, I don't know, they put together a sense of where the feeling is on this issue. Let's deal with the United States first.

In terms of the trust in the news people use. Now, that could be any news source, but overall, the trust in news that they use. 45% say, I trust that. I trust what I'm reading there. I trust what I'm seeing, I'm listening to. Trust in social media for news. So, you know, Twitter, Facebook, what have you, which is a major concern, as you know,

especially the Facebook issue. But here, trust in social media for news. In the United States, 14%, only 14%, just over 1 out of 10, say they trust what they see on social media. Trust in search engines for news, right? So you go to a search engine, for example, Google, and you type in latest COVID stats. Or that's not a good example. Something about latest debate on vaccines. You type that in.

Well, in the States, only 22% say they trust that. Let's look at the United Kingdom. Trusted news that they use, 39%. So a little less than the Americans. Trust in social media, way down, 6%. 6%. It's like 1 out of 20 trust what they see on social media. Trust in search engines for news, 15%.

So all those numbers considerably lower than the U.S. So where do we stand? Where does Canada stand? Trust in the news they use? Could be anything, right? Could be any news source that they use, Canadians. 52%. That's higher than the other two. Considerably higher. Not just a little bit higher, considerably higher. Trust in social media for news. Highest again, 19%. One out of five trust what they see on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, whatever. Trust in search engines, 31%. Trust what pops up when they go on the search engine.

Considerably more than the Americans and way, way more than the British. So we're a pretty trustworthy people. We trust our news organizations and we trust our Facebooks and our Twitters and our search engines more than the others. Now, all these numbers are at best half, but most of them are well below 50%. Now, they also asked an overall trust in news question, but they didn't ask Canadians this question for some reason. But they did ask the U.S. and the U.K.

And they're pretty similar. In the United States, 29% have trust overall in the news they consume. So just under one out of three. And in the U. UK, it's 28%. Now, there's another interesting question, at least I found it interesting, because you are being pressured all over the place, including for some who listen to the bridge, to pay for the digital operation. Either you directly pay, or you live with the fact that there are some commercials on the more popular digital offerings like podcasts.

Because obviously advertisers aren't going to advertise on something that nobody listens to. Or, to be fair, to those that say, I don't want advertising at all. I'll consume all the costs of this myself, which, as you know, I did for more than a year. But now, in some platforms, there are commercials limited, but there are commercials. Anyway, are people willing to pay for digital news?

It's a little different, right? Say you have a subscription to a national newspaper. You've had to pay for that to receive the digital copy. 13% say they are paying for news through a digital space in Canada, 13%. In the United States, 20%. In the UK, 7%. That's the lowest. But in the US, one out of five say they're paying for digital news.

And I think that number spiked through the whole Trump era as people were consumed, if you will, by that story. All right, I thought you'd find some of that interesting, and I hope you did. But the lasting memory for me for this program is going to be the last answer from Dr. Lisa Barrett, who took us basically inside the hospital for that moment and that conversation

with somebody suffering from COVID-19. Our best wishes, our hopes, prayers go to that young fellow, as they do to all those who are battling this right now. All right, tomorrow, Wednesday, hump day. It's also Smoke Mirrors and the Truth. Bruce Anderson will be by, and I think I know what we're going to talk about. You know that whatever we talk about is going to be good.

So make sure you tune in. I'm Peter Mansbridge. This has been The Bridge for Tuesday. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours. Thank you.