The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Lockdowns -- Do They Work?

Episode Date: December 21, 2020

Plus -- Who had the better election turnout, the United States 2020 or Canada 2019?

and hello there peter mansbridge here with the latest episode of the bridge daily it's monday of week 41 and it's big week right it's the week that contains the shortest day of the year. That's today, I think. Shortest day. Lots of darkness. Depending on where you live, a lot of darkness. But it's also a big holiday week, right? Depending on which faith you are, you've likely got a holiday this week.

Reason to celebrate, not the way we used to, but we'll find a way. We'll find a way, because that's what we've done for 41 weeks. We've found ways to do things. I'll be celebrating Christmas on Friday. I'm going to have to work out a podcast schedule for the next little while, but I haven't got to that yet. Things to talk about today include the word lockdown. I'll get to that in a moment. But first, let me just say I want to really thank you for I got a lot of email this weekend. On Friday and Saturday and yesterday, Sunday, I got a lot

of emails from many of you talking about what the podcast has meant to you this year, and I really appreciate that. Also, quite a few requests still for book plates. And so they just, I was actually just at the post office just a little while ago. And I dropped those letters off, mailed them, and also mailed the parcel to Wayne Kruski. Wayne was our winner on Friday of the letter I picked for his sense of the word or the phrase of the year for 2020.

I'm thinking of a, some form of contest for this week. I haven't quite got it shaped in my mind yet. I think I have an idea. And if I do, I'll let you know tomorrow because it's going to, any way you cut it, it's probably going to be a short week right? In terms of podcasts. So I want the entries in by Thursday. But I haven't quite I haven't nailed it down yet. I think I have an idea.

And we'll try it. So thank you for all the nice mail. Thank you for the request for book plates. And thank you, Wayne, for your entry, the winning entry. Now, in terms of, I have a few topics for today, but the main one is in and around the word lockdown. Because it looks, no matter where you gaze around the globe right now, certainly in Europe and in the Americas, you're looking at lockdowns. Various forms of lockdowns.

They mean different things to different people. And I don't know, for some reason, I think that's part of the problem with lockdowns is they are different. I just look at Canada, different provincial lockdowns going on, Ontario bringing in a big one today. So the question becomes, do they work? And that's going to be the focus in a minute of the discussion I'm about to have with somebody who we all respect, who's done a heck of a job throughout this

and seems to be anywhere and everywhere you look for advice. And that is our friend, Dr. Isaac Boguch. He's an internal medicine guy. I mean, listen, he's got a list of degrees and fellowships as long as your arm. From the U of T, from Harvard, from the Massachusetts General Hospital. They're all over the place, including an institute in Peru. So Dr. Bogoch, he knows his stuff, and that's probably why everybody wants to talk to him. He's on a lot of media, does a lot of media stuff.

I mean, first of all, he's a doctor. So he's obviously dealing with patients and he's dealing with COVID patients. And he's trying to help us understand the issues at play and share some of his general knowledge with us. And this morning when I, you know, I sent him an email last night and I said, is there any chance we can have a quick chat? And he knows what a quick chat means on the bridge. It means like not so quick.

But as he has done before, he made himself available to me, which was very kind of him. And I tracked him down. He was in his office between, like he's juggling a lot of things now. He's an advisor to governments, companies, the media, and mainly patients at his hospital. And so there he was, and we did our conversation on the platform I use. It's kind of like Zoom. So I can see him, but we're only recording the audio, right? And he's pacing up and down in his office, and I can tell, you know, he's got all these other things on his mind as well,

all these other things he's got to deal with today. But having said all that, he makes time for us. So let's get it started because there are issues to discuss. Lockdown, you know, the new strain of a virus in Britain. A lockdown is like, do they work? The new strain is, how serious is this? Do we need to be worried about this? I mean, Canada has, among other countries, blocked air traffic from Britain coming in,

at least for the next three days. So there's obviously some concern. But how much concern should there be? So I wanted to talk to Dr. Boguch about all those issues. And I hope you enjoy this conversation. Well, joy is not the right word, but I hope you learn from this conversation because he's really good, right? So that's the setup. Here's

the interview. Doctor, the most populous province in the country is going into a full lockdown now. In your view, do lockdowns work? Sadly, they do. It's terrible though. Like this is really your last option. And this is where everything else has failed or you haven't constructed policies such that you've got the virus under control. But at the end of the day, what the lockdowns do is they basically reduce the number of contacts between people. And they can help reduce the number of new cases per day. What they don't do is they don't deal with the upstream effects. It doesn't deal with the drivers of infection in your community. And that's the key thing. How can you stop the upstream effects? How can you

deal with the drivers of infection in your community? The lockdowns will certainly suppress that, but it doesn't eliminate that. So if you only deal with a lockdown, if you only do a lockdown and you don't deal with the underlying root causes of infection in your community, you're going to be left with an endless cycle of lockdowns. You put that into the context of where we're at now in Canada. Yeah, we've got vaccine programs that are rolling out, but it's going to be months before a significant proportion of the population is immunized. So my concern is this lockdown will probably help at least, you know, in a couple of weeks, at least start to see some of these cases get under control. But once you lift it, you're going to be back at square one if you haven't dealt with the underlying drivers of infection in the community. Well, that becomes the key question of trying to determine

what are the root causes. I think maybe I heard you wrong, but I think I heard you yesterday suggesting that one of the benefits of a lockdown is it helps you determine what in fact are the root causes. Because at this point, in many cases, we still don't know. All we know is that the numbers have gone up, specifically in Ontario and Alberta, BC, have gone up like a rocket. And it's unclear always what the root cause is. Yeah, that's a good point. And I agree with that. But we certainly know what some of the root causes are as well. And, you know, those really are challenging questions because a lot of these issues really

involve with dealing with inequities that we have in Canada and in Ontario, for example. We're dealing with people who are perhaps precarious workers, essential workers working in essential industries. We're dealing with safe workspaces. We're dealing with measures such as, for example, paid sick leave because people might not be earning enough. They'll go to work sick and infect other people at work. They might come home to intergenerational homes and infect others. This is what we're seeing in many of the hotspots in and around Ontario and in and around Canada that are driving this infection. And these are harder issues to deal with because they deal with facing some of the inequities that we have in Canada head on. But until you deal with that, I don't think it's fair to say that you'll get this

pandemic under control in the country because that is driving a lot, not all, but that is driving a lot of the infection. There's still a lot of suspicion, as you know, by, you know, right-minded people that, that schools are an issue, that they're a spreader. Where are you on that now? Yeah. I, it's interesting. I mean, there's data. It's not perfect data, but there is data. I think it's fair to say that, you know, infected kids and staff have gone to school. We knew that long before school started. That was going to happen. It's also fair to say that there has been some transmission within the school. I mean, it's been measured and we've seen that. But most, I think it's also fair to say that schools are not in and of themselves driving this pandemic, or at least the epidemic in Canada. There certainly

have been cases introduced. There certainly have been cases transmitted. But is that the driver of Canada's epidemic? It probably isn't. And, you know, there's some more recent data from Toronto where they did, for example, asymptomatic testing in about 4,500 people. They only found, you know, what is about 50 something cases and 26 of those cases were in one school. So it's, you know, that's not definitive in and of itself. There's snippets of data that point in that direction. That also doesn't mean we shouldn't create safer schools. Of course, we should create safer schools. Of course, we should create safer learning environments. And of course, we should be doing everything we can to make sure people that work in schools and students have a safe learning environment. But I don't think, based on what we have to date, that the schools in and of themselves are driving the pandemic.

It also doesn't mean that there isn't transmission in the school. There is. It just probably isn't as much as what we would have thought it was going to be several months ago. You know, there's quite a bit of concern all of a sudden, even though there have been kind of reports of this out for the last little while. But a lot of concern over the last few days about this new strain of the coronavirus that the British have determined is happening in not just the one small part of Britain, but in a number of parts of Britain. And as a result, they're clamping down seriously in terms of lockdown, but so are countries outside of Britain saying, hey, including Canada, saying, hey, we're going to take a breather, a pause,

from you coming into our country. And I think the Canadian one is three days. Here's my question on this new strain. Because there's very little that we really know about it, other than it appears to be more transmittable than it is severe. There's been little research into it so far, certainly no peer-reviewed study of any research. And there's no indication that it blunts the vaccine.

So what's the issue here? That's a great point. I agree completely. I think these are the unknowns, though, right? There's certainly those three unknowns. Is it more transmissible? Maybe. It might be. You hear that 70% more transmissible? I don't think many people actually believe that. It might be more transmissible. How much? Who knows? And there's certainly a possibility that it might not be more transmissible as well. So there's just shreds of evidence that are sort of pointing in that direction. The other point is,

does it cause a more severe illness? Unlikely. It't appear that that's the case. But again, not entirely clear just yet. And will this impact vaccination? Again, based on conversations with vaccinologists and virologists, again, it's very unlikely unknown. And I think it's OK to be cautious for a period of time until there's more clarity over those issues. And, you know, at the end of the day, this might not really amount to much. And that would be OK if it does amount to much. It's OK to be careful as well. And it's also interesting from a Canadian perspective. We have the quarantine act in place and also travel is at a near standstill. It's not zero travel, but there's not a lot of people coming into the country. It's certainly relative to what we were seeing in 2019.

And everyone that does come into the country is subject to the Quarantine Act. Yes, we know it's not perfect, but it's still very, very good. So I think that 72-hour pause on travel to sort of figure things out, plus these enhanced measures that the-hour pause on travel to sort of figure things out, plus these enhanced measures that the government says they're going to take on those who have arrived from the UK who are in a 14-day period of quarantine are the right move. Let's take this seriously, because if it is something, at least we'll be able to get a handle on it. I don't have a crystal ball. I don't have a crystal ball, but I think at the end of the day, this one will not really amount to much.

But again, I could be wrong, and I'm clearly open-minded to data that emerges. One of the things that struck me, especially over the weekend, was it was almost coming out sounding like an Hollywood movie. Oh, my God, a mutant strain, and it's going to be, you know, all the potential for terrible things, which I assume, you know, is possible, it could happen. But new strains of a virus like this, that's not unusual. That's kind of expected, isn't it, as the thing progresses? Yeah, exactly.

Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Yeah, no, but that's more or less expected as a virus progresses. Yeah, that's exactly correct. And viruses mutate all the time. This is exactly what they do. We've known that a while, long before COVID-19. And in fact, epidemiologists have really harnessed the virus mutations to really help determine how this is spread around the world. I think the key thing here was that these mutations were on a part of the virus called

the spike protein. And the spike protein's main function is to help the virus get into our body's cells. It's also the part of the virus that all the vaccines are really targeting. But at the end of the day, when you look at the mutations that have occurred on the spike protein and you look at how vaccines target the spike protein, it's just unlikely that this will impact the efficacy of a vaccine. At the end of the day, what's going to happen here? Will this vaccine work? The answer is very likely yes. The next question is, will this virus change significantly over time such that we might need a new vaccine or a booster vaccine? The answer there is also probably yes.

But, you know, it's hard to say, are we going to need annual boosters or another vaccine in, you know, one year, three years, five years? Who knows? You know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't think anyone really knows the answer to that yet. But luckily, this is being followed very closely. And, you know, we knows? You know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't think anyone really knows the answer to that yet, but, but luckily this is being followed very closely and, you know, we'll, we'll figure it out with time. At the end of the day, I think nothing really changes for us right now. What are we going to do? We're not going to do anything differently. We're still

going to put on a mask. We're still going to physically distance ourselves. We're still going to get the vaccine when it's our turn. And that's the end of that. I think we'll be okay. Two quick questions. You know, last week, there's no question that we were all focused on the rollout of first Pfizer and now Moderna and the incredibly positive news that that offers us and the amazing amount of research that went into getting to this point so quickly. Yet there was often this sort of good news, bad news way of telling the daily story. And, you know, once the shine is off the fact the vaccines have started to roll out, it's going to take time, quite a bit of time, really. But at what point should our focus sort of, okay, they're doing their thing

and they'll do their thing as long as it takes, but our real focus should be on the fact we still got a big problem here. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think both are true. Like, we could really be excited for vaccine programs and vaccine programs rolling out, but we can also be extremely

careful about the state that we're in and much of the country that we have unacceptable case burdens of COVID-19 that are filling up our hospitals and people are dying. We really have to double down on our efforts to keep this under control. We know that the end of December and January are going to be very, very difficult months because of this degree of transmission. We know that hospitals are filling up and are being stretched beyond capacity in many parts of the country. And we've got to do everything we can to protect ourselves and our families and our communities until these programs, these vaccine programs, start to scale up. And it's going to take months and months and months for these to scale up. Well, which we're seeing done across the country. And that will help. I really think that will help, but it's not going to solve all our problems.

And really, we've got to be very careful until probably the middle part of the year when we start to see vaccines offered to many, many more Canadians apart from those who are in the highest of high-risk categories. Let me close out, if I can, by being, you know, a little personal with you. I mean, obviously you're focused on this issue in many different ways because of your job, but you're human too. And we're into, you know, we're into the major part of the biggest holiday for many people of the year. And, you know, Christmas at the end of the week.

What's your Christmas story? What's your holiday story? What do you think of at this point? Yeah, I mean, I'm nervous. I really am nervous. You know, as the token Jewish guy at the Toronto General Hospital, I work Christmas every year. And I'm, you know, expecting to see a lot of cases of COVID-19. I'm expecting to see a lot of people whose holidays are ruined because of this virus. And, you know, I know that this is not unique to the hospital that I work at. This is going to be seen across the country. And I know that, you know, based on

human behavior and modeling and what we've seen so far, the tail end of December and parts of January are really going to be tough. And it's upsetting. It's really upsetting to watch because a lot of this is preventable. Not all of it, but a lot of this is preventable. And, you know, just, you know, there's, we talk about numbers all the time. Case numbers and hospitals being overwhelmed. But, you know, sometimes we lose sight of what this actually means at a very personal level. And, you know, I'm still a frontline health care provider. I'm not going to pretend to speak on behalf of all frontline health care providers.

But, like, it's tough. You know, it's tough to watch patients get sick and die from this infection. And, you know, it's tough to hear the stories and chat with the families and manage some of these cases. It's certainly not easy. And, you know, I think a lot of healthcare providers currently are, you know, they've had a tough year and just like everyone else in Canada. But, you know, I really hope people heed the advice of the public health leaders across the country and really do everything they can to protect themselves

and protect their families. Because it's going to be a tough month. December is going to be tough. January is going to be tough. But at the end of the day, while 2021 might start off on a pretty bad note,

it really will get better and better and better. We just have to get through the next couple of months until that starts. Well, let's hope we can all keep our focus that way. Obviously, we appreciate your time. We appreciate the work that all of you and your colleagues do. And we all celebrate these holidays in different ways according to our faith. And we hope that you and your family are able

to spend some time not only together, but thinking possibly of some of the bright side that hopefully is still to come. So thank you again. My pleasure. Lovely to chat with you. Dr. Isaac Bogoch, a pretty remarkable guy, just as are the frontline health care workers on so many levels, doctors, nurses, paramedics, those who work at hospitals in various different functions to help the operation of a modern-day hospital in big cities and small towns right across Canada. And of course, you know, the other people at the front line of all this who have become essential workers for us, whether they're at grocery stores or post offices

or on farms or truck drivers, you name it. There's a long list, a lot longer of a list than we ever thought of before this thing struck. And we appreciate and are grateful and are thankful for everything they do. And for Dr. Isaac Bogoch, once again, I so appreciate being able to listen to him and get cut to the truth, right? Cut to the basics on what he knows at the front line of this. And being honest about what he's still unclear about. And that's all a part of this story

too. Okay. I want to actually close out on a couple of small things that have nothing to do with COVID. But have something to do with one loose end that we didn't tie up in terms of the U.S. election, which is now what? More than a month and a half ago. It feels like yesterday, right? November 3rd. But it was quite a long time ago.

And it's always an issue around elections, and we've seen the same thing in Canada. And the issue is turnout. How many people are actually going to turn out to vote? That very basic of the luxuries that we have living in a democracy, we vote. We can vote. We can make the decisions about the future

and whose hands we're willing to place it in. So, you know, the U.S. has not had a good track record on turnout over the last while. There are times when it's been less than 50%. But not this time. This was an election that attracted people on both sides of the Trump-Biden issue. And the turnout was, I was going to say pretty good. You know, pretty good would be in the 80s or 90s, right?

That would be great. That would be a commitment to the system of government that we have. But if you've been teetering around the 50% mark for some time, when you get 67%, that's pretty good in the U.S. So here are the totals, the numbers, according to NPR, National Public Radio. More Americans voted in 2020 than in any other presidential election in 120 years, with about 67% of eligible voters casting ballots this year. Now, you go, okay, eligible voters, what does that mean? You know, who didn't vote? How many people didn't vote? About 80 million people did not vote.

Now, the main reasons for those 80 million, it's broken down. They've got some pretty good data here in the States. The main reasons, not being registered. You've got to register to vote in the U.S., right? You've got to register beforehand. 29% of those who didn't vote didn't vote because they weren't registered. 23% didn't vote because, hey, I'm not interested in politics. I don't care who wins.

All right. Not liking the candidates, 20%. Didn't like the candidates. A feeling their vote wouldn't have made a difference, 16%. Sadly, you get that answer a lot in this country too. It doesn't matter who I vote for. It's not going to make a difference. And then 10%, in that category that we sometimes overstate,

being undecided on whom to vote for. So, 67% and you say, how does that compare with Canada in 2019? Well, funny you should ask. Because the answer there is in Canada in 2019, 66% of those who could vote, voted. So a percentage point lower than the American numbers. And that's got to be a first, certainly in my lifetime. Interesting, huh?

I mean, I still see that as one of the classic issues about us and not voting. It's worse in municipal elections and in provincial elections and in federal elections. And I've said this before on this podcast, but it's so true. And you've been in countries, I know some of you have, where you witness people literally crying in the lineups to vote because they're so grateful and excited to have that opportunity to vote and make a determination on the future of their country. And they'll line up for hours. They'll line up for hours because in some cases

their parents fought for that right. In some cases their parents or grandparents died for that right. And they're not going to waste it by saying, oh, you know, it doesn't matter who I vote for, or I don't care, or I don't know which one's which. Spend some time. Anyway, congratulations to the 67% of Americans who voted in the November 3rd election

more than any other presidential election in 120 years. Now, here's the last thing I'm going to say, and it also, you know, so many people are trying to determine what the heck is going to happen in the last month. I keep saying that Trump will be out of there on the 20th, and in spite of all the bluster and hoops that he's jumping through right now, that'll happen. Every once in a while, I get tested on that theory, including the last couple of days. Now, even though Trump is denying it, it seems to be sourced really well by New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News, others. There was a meeting on Friday night in the Oval Office in the White House

with the president, his chief of staff, his top lawyer, Sidney Powell, who's the woman who, the conspiracy theorist who pops up on right-wing television all the time with her wild ideas about what happened during the election, and Michael Flynn, remember him, the disgraced former national security advisor who admitted to lying twice, was sentenced to jail but managed through a series of hoops to get that delayed until such time as the president gave him a pardon a couple of weeks ago. So he's back in there. He's in the Oval Office sitting with the others, including the president, where among the suggestions to still overturn the election,

we're declaring martial law in swing states and have the election redone, so like redo the voting. Also, Rudy Giuliani wanted to seize voting machines so that he could take them apart and have a look at them, come up with ideas about how the voting machines were rigged. Now this is leaking out, right? And there's only one way that can leak out. That's one of those people I mentioned has leaked it. They're the only ones in the room.

They're all trying to make, or some of them are trying to make, or some of them are trying to make themselves look better than the way history is going to write this up. I mean, that whole scene, it sounds like a bad kind of 1950s Burt Lancaster film. Although I don't know whether he ever made any bad films, but this whole conspiracy, we're going to overthrow the government. We are the government. We're going to overthrow it anyway, so we don't have to leave.

It just like sounds wacko. But it happened. Now think about this. Think about this. Think about this. If that story leaked out, just wait for what leaks out after Trump is hoisted from the White House. all those aides and those who wanted to be aides, but have been sort of there and have heard things, all those people will be leaking like sieves once the transition is completed and Joe Biden is president. They'll be writing articles.

They'll be selling their stories to magazines. Some of them will be writing books, giving 60-minute interviews. And you can bet the stories will make a lot of people shiver about the things that happened and the things that were talked about inside this White House, inside the Oval Office, sitting at the Resolute Desk. Because after you hear a story about

the President of the United States discussing, it doesn't matter whether he agreed to it or not, but the very fact he was discussing introducing martial law, if that's true, then we better be prepared for just about anything. Because you know most people have shut up. They haven't said, boo. But once the transition is done on the 20th, all bets are off.

All deals are off. Those stories are going to come out. And they're going to come out big time. So I wouldn't be surprised surprised anything. Everything's possible. Okay. Day one, Monday, week 41. We're off to the races. We got lots more in store for the rest of the week. Wednesday, of course, Smoke Mirrors and the Truth. We're going to have kind of our year-end edition. We're going to kind of look back, pick some winners and losers on the year.

Kathleen Petty, my friend Kathleen Petty from Calgary, is going to join us. She's got a great podcast called West of Center. And, you know, she used to be the host of The House on CBC Radio. She used to be a host on News Network back when it was called News World. Really smart.

Great person, good friend. She's going to join Bruce and I on Wednesday. So we'll have a good chat. But that's Wednesday. Tomorrow is, who knows? Better tune in. That's the Bridge Daily for this day. I'm Peter Mansbridge.

Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back in 24 hours. Thank you.