The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - What's Worse - Panic or Pandemic?

Episode Date: March 6, 2020

For the health and political leaders dealing with COVID 19, the way to ease public fears is through calmness and confidence. Are we getting either? (Recorded Noon EST 06/03/20)

Hello there, I'm Peter Mansbridge. This is The Bridge, and if you recall the last couple of weeks, I've been telling you I was about to embark on this big international tour. I did go to Europe 10 days ago, but I was supposed to be, well, at this particular moment, I was supposed to be sitting on the shores of the Zambezi River near the meeting point of two great Southern African countries, Zambia and Zimbabwe, at the Siongo. What's the Siongo? It's the place of the rainbow. Some of you know, probably, where that really is. Well, that is where it really is, but what it's also known as, more commonly known, especially in different parts of the world, as Victoria Falls, one of the great sites in the world.

That's where I was supposed to be. This weekend, sitting there, seeing this incredible sight, sitting at one of the world's greatest hotels, certainly one of South Africa's certain, or Southern Africa's greatest hotels. But I'm not there. Instead, I'm in the snow of southwestern Ontario. I'm in Stratford, hometown. Now, I'm not here because the snow kept me here. I'm here because of a tough decision that a lot of people are making in different parts of the world.

They're making a decision about travel based on the disruption that's being caused around the world because of the coronavirus, or COVID-19 as it's called. Not for fear that I was suddenly going to get COVID-19 sitting next to Victoria Falls. In fact, there are no reports at all of any cases in southern Africa. But one of the issues that is concerning a lot of people is international air travel, especially for these long flights going through busy airports and the problems that that can create. So I decided this was kind of like partially a holiday,

partially business, but I could easily delay it a bit, and that's what I've done. I've delayed it a bit, and we'll see, hopefully still do this trip. It's going to be over 10, 12 days to a number of places in southern Africa, in Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa. It's an important trip for me, and I'm looking forward to doing it. It's just not going to be over this next week or 10 days. So I wanted to kind of clue you in on that because I'd left the expectation that I might be doing the podcast from there. I will eventually, but it's not going to be this week.

However, this week we are going to discuss some more about the coronavirus and the way it's being, I guess, handled. You know, this is a tough one. You know, I'm sure you've been looking at the numbers and the cases, and they seem to go up every day, although the pace of the numbers in China, the country that where all this started, has started to drop, or at least that's what the Chinese are saying. There have been questions about Chinese authorities, what they've said on this all along, that they haven't been fully transparent. And there are questions again today

about whether they're being transparent now, or whether they're just trying to leave the impression that things are starting now on the downswing there. Nevertheless, if you're looking for good news, or potentially good news, in a picture of a lot of bad news, that would be it. That there could be a sign things are slowing down in China. But I'm not sure who believes it, because some of the reaction around the world is really negative. And the way it's impacting the economy, and I'm not just talking about the stock markets here. Stock markets go up and down, and people can manipulate them in different ways but the worldwide economy is having an impact airlines are facing huge cancellations um the uh you know i'm i'm some of you know i'm also in the business of giving speeches at various conferences and conventions uh across our country and across

the united states as well, for that matter. And that business is being impacted dramatically. A number of conventions have cancelled in different parts of this continent. And big international meetings have been cancelled in different parts of the world, all because of this, because of the concern about international travel and about travel in particular. So those things are having a huge impact. And it, you know, trickles right down to not just big companies, but small companies and small businesses

that are impacted by this story. And, you know, I got to Stratford last night. I've been in Toronto the last couple of days attending a couple of meetings. And I got to Stratford last night. I stopped at one of the local drugstores. I find out that all the drugstores in Stratford and communities in this particular area, and I guess they're not alone,

no hand wash, no Purell, various other different forms. They're sold out, gone. Some places are sold out of toilet paper because people are stocking up, storing. So this impacts everybody's kind of daily life. So what's the key to all this? What's the key to handling?

Obviously, the researchers and the scientists are going 110%, as they say in the sports business, trying to find the vaccine which will help. But this could be months, if not years, away. Companies are trying to develop these test kits. And it's remarkable, really, when you consider in the United States, in the United States, they can't develop these in mass forms right now. They say they may have a million test kits in another week or two. This is a country of 350 million people with many demanding tests like right now. States, state governments, governors demanding help on getting the test kits.

And if they're not getting them, I assume we're not getting them in huge numbers either in Canada. But it just seems mind-boggling to me that, you know, when the full weight of the American manufacturing industry puts that weight behind a project. Things happen in a hurry. Look what happened in the Second World War. The way they produced tanks and ships and planes almost immediately

once they got into it. Now, obviously they weren't doing it in the first week, but it's not like they haven't known this was coming. You know, Donald Trump, we'll get to him in a minute, but on one hand he's bragging about, hell, we acted on this right away. We acted on this two months ago when we first heard about it. Well, he didn't act on it in trying to get test kits ready, did he?

Or did they? I don't know who takes the blame for that, but we're sitting there, no test kits, or not enough test kits. But the secret to dealing with this starts with a degree of calm and confidence in those you are listening to, those who are giving you the news. So it's a challenging time for news organizations, and it's a time for the political and health leaders in various countries on how they translate this news, how they move information around this story. Calm and confidence.

Because you know what's going to happen here. If there's no calm and there's no confidence in what you're hearing, you run the risk, the very real risk, that the panic surrounding something like this story can end up being worse than the pandemic, which appears to be what we're dealing with now. The panic worseened the pandemic. And you can see what happens in a situation like that. The people have lost confidence. If they lose confidence in their leaders, they will panic. And panic can lead to all kinds of situations that we don't even think about. So panic versus pandemic.

So you look to your leaders. So let me just deal with our continent. Obviously, a lot of the major stuff that's going on around this is happening south of the border. So you have in President Trump, somebody who daily seems to do something or say something that ends up, you know, causing consternation. We're all used to the fact that President Trump distorts the truth. He does it all the time. You can call it misinformation or you can call it lies. And I've been calling it lies for more than a little while because I don't think it's any accident.

But then there are things like today. This is Friday I'm putting this podcast out. As many of you know, I always release it at 6 p.m. Eastern time on Fridays, and it gives you something to listen to over the weekend. So what happens today? This morning, I guess it was around 10 o'clock, the White House puts out a statement that the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, has been proactive and prepared since the very beginning, and the president does not want to interfere with the CDC's mission to protect

the health and welfare of their people and their agency. They put this out in announcing that the president, who had been planning to visit the CDC offices today, this morning, had canceled that visit. And that's why, because he didn't want to interfere with the work they were doing to protect the health and welfare of their people and their agency and so that that was the thoughtful statement put out there was calm and it was confident so 15 minutes later what does donald trump say when he's talking with reporters? He undercuts his own White House statement, saying he scrapped the trip to the CDC because they had one person who was potentially infected,

and speaking of that, I'd like to go because of the one person they didn't want me going, but I would prefer going. Hello? Does that sound calm and confident? It sounds like nobody knows what the hell's going on to the point where, you know, I didn't go because they have somebody who was sick there. I don't know. You know, there were other examples in the last couple of days, as you know,

involving the President of the United States. He said he didn't believe the death rates that were being published by the various organizations that are responsible for keeping control of these numbers and putting them out in a calm and rational way. He said he didn't believe them. And it was his hunch, that's the word he used, hunch that they were lower. I don't know. To me me it ends up looking to me like this is a guy who's desperate to look like he's in charge of something he doesn't really understand but i don't know that's where it strikes at the whole issue of calm and confidence. So what did he do and what did his White House do when this thing was starting to clearly show that this was going to be a huge problem

and they didn't look like they were on top of it? They set up a special task force led by the vice president, Mike Pence. So how's that been working for you? Well, you know, quite frankly, I think for the first time in the three and a half years since the inauguration, or almost three and a half years, Mike Pence has not looked like the toady he's looked at, looked like in all the various, you know,

appearances he's made in those three-plus years. He's looked like he was actually in charge of something, and he was handling it. And quite frankly, at his briefings almost daily, he's looked calm and confident and in control of the issues that he was discussing and he was sharing the platform with people not as trained seals but as real research scientists leaders of the various health departments in the United States and giving them the opportunity to speak and he was almost acting at times like just sort of an emcee a quarterback moving the

microphone to around to different people however he had a problem right out of the gate he had a problem and it's a problem that the White House and the Republican Party has always had, certainly in these last three years, there was the appearance that they were ignoring any women and senior women in health portfolios. There were none there at the first briefing or the second briefing. The first couple of days, there were no women there. So they started taking serious hits and criticism. Where are the women who lead certain departments? Why is it

just a bunch of guys? And they took that criticism and acted on it right away. Well, not right away, but within a couple of days. And suddenly you had, as you've had ever since, of course now that'll change now that I'm saying this, but ever since, whenever you see Mike Pence, on either side of him are two women. And this isn't tokenism. These are senior players in the various health fields in the United States. And they should have been there from the beginning, especially Seema Verma, who is the administrator of the,

sorry, she's the Department of Health and Human Services administrator for Medicaid services. And she, you'll see whenever you watch Pence at the microphone, if you're looking at the television, she is to the right of Mike Pence, and to the left of Mike Pence is Dr. Deborah Birx, who's the administrator of the Centers for Medicare. Now, those two women both should have been there from the beginning. They both

now are active participants in these briefings. And as I said, especially Seema Verma, she's all over the story and has been from the beginning. So they're there all the time now. And that issue, I guess, is eliminated. But, you know, politics enters this stuff all the time. Because they took a hit, because they were criticized, now these two women are immediately beside them. Like, of a group of, you know, they're half a dozen or more. Now the two women are right there. They're the first two people next to them.

So that's the U.S. stuff. And, you know, there are going to be issues, and there are issues already about the speed in which they've been acting, the veracity of the numbers they put forward, and the comments by the president, who drops in and out of these meetings for a few minutes and then walks out and says something that causes a degree of consternation on the part of a lot of the people who are on the task force, and confusion in the public, which rewinds me back to that original point. Calm and confidence, you've got to have that to prevent panic. So what's happening here?

What's happening in Canada? The Prime Minister has taken kind of a lead role to a degree, but then they kind of mimic the U.S. They set up a task force with some of the leading health authorities in this country who are calm and they are confident,

and they give their briefings on a daily basis with the top political leaders, including the health minister, Patty Hajdu, and Christopher Freeland, the deputy prime minister, chairs this task force. I don't know. That kind of looked like, well, gee, Mike Pence is doing it in the States. Maybe we ought to have the deputy prime minister doing it here.

I have no problems with Chrystia Freeland. In fact, I'm a fan. I think she's as close as we have as a rock star in that cabinet, although I've got to tell you, Patty Hajdu is looking pretty good, the health minister, on this story, as is Dr. Bonnie Henry in British Columbia. She's the B.C. health officer. She's been terrific, too, with B.C. dealing with some difficult situations there.

Bill Morneau, the finance minister, has been making an appearance as well quite frequently because of the economic impact on the country. So, I mean, you've got a number of things going on here. Quite frankly, personally, I would much prefer if I just got the news on a daily basis from the top medical people on the one hand, and then for the accountability questions, certainly there are questions to political leaders. But I think the top health and medical leaders

are the ones that you want to hear from to tell you what you should be doing, how you should be reacting. They're the ones who, with calmness and confidence, can explain the situation best. And they can be pretty clear when they want you to know that this is not going away tomorrow. When Donald Trump says, as he said today, you know, no problem. We're in control. We know what we're doing. We're handling this. The numbers are going down. The numbers are going up. Numbers are going up big time.

What did he say today he said you know talking about when they got started on this in January we closed it down we stopped it well if he stopped it there were 15 confirmed cases in the United States a week ago

there are 233 today at last count. And the estimates are there'll be 5,000 in a week. That doesn't sound like they've stopped it or closed it down. Oy. Okay. That's where we are. But let me return to my point that I've made more than a few times. We have every reason to believe that our people in the health area

are knowledgeable and are doing their best with a relationship with others in different parts of the world, including the World Health Organization, to bring all of this under control. It's not going to happen overnight. It's going to take a while. But calmness and confidence in your leadership is what's needed. And every time something happens to chip away at that calm and confidence, panic starts to win. And that can't happen. We don't want that to win. And that can't happen. We don't want that to happen. Nobody wants that to happen.

All right, we're going to take a quick break. I'm going to come back. I'm going to read some thoughts from overseas from a friend of this podcast and a really good friend of mine. So we're right back after this. And hello again. We're not alone watching the COVID-19 story, the coronavirus story.

And a really close friend of our family is a student who is at this year right now taking her part of her third year of university in Copenhagen at the university there. And she dropped me a line last night about this story because it's interesting to see how people are doing in other parts of the world because it is a huge international story and it does impact everybody. So she made some interesting thoughts.

And central to her thought is one of the reasons she went to Copenhagen to take this semester there was the opportunity to see another part of the world, meet other people, and to travel. You know, a great part of being in Europe is you can go from A to B to C to D for very little money with airfare because of various discount airlines that operate safely

and pretty much on time, quite frankly. And so you can, on weekends, as a student in Copenhagen or Paris or wherever you happen to be, you can travel. You can see Europe at a very, very reasonable rate. You know, like, what was it, Copenhagen to Edinburgh return was like $30 Canadian, or 30 euros, whatever. It was very reasonable, and why wouldn't you so

our friend Rebecca writes me you know speaking as an exchange student who's here for limited time there's a fine line between being anxious and not wanting to travel as much but also wanting to get the most out of my time here and take advantage of all there is to experience. It's hard to know how careful to be and how to gauge your worries. That's, you know, so true. I mean, if you're left just sitting in your dorm on the weekends, you know, away from your family and friends at home it does make you question why you went through all this but rebecca you know she's as she says she's weighing this carefully last last week tough life she was in i think it was vienna for the weekend. And next week she's hoping to go to Berlin.

But it's a gamble. As she says, three of my friends had their trips to Dusseldorf completely canceled. And of course everyone who had bought tickets to cities in Italy had theirs canceled as well. This is all because of the virus. Trips are being canceled in cases where they were designed to be going to a place where there were real problems or because there have been so many cancellations, it probably doesn't make sense for the airline to make the flights.

Then there's this other part. I spoke to one of my friends from Japan, and she was telling me that the racial goggles that the world has put on are very real. She said that she wore a mask on a plane ride back to Copenhagen recently, and got an unbelievable number of glares and dirty looks, and that in general people are much more hesitant to be around here. I've really noticed the privilege that comes along with looking like a Dane in regular life here. So it's sad that there's yet another layer being added to that for someone like her. Something else to keep in mind. And finally, so this whole thing isn't about sounding down, I'm pessimistic about life in general,

she does give me something, you know, she gives me a couple of little stories here that are kind of funny, funny may not be the right word, but do make you smile, on that trip last weekend to venice i watched one guy fill his hands up with hand sanitizer after sitting in his seat and rub it all over his face and his hair and his beard as if it was sunscreen or something can't imagine that did much for him. I don't imagine it did.

And there was one other one. Where is it? It's a great line. Where is it? Well, of course, when you want it it you can't find it but it was basically it was kind of the dark way of looking at this if you're going to end up getting covid 19 she said her and her friends have decided well know, if you're going to get it anyway, might as well get it at a deeply discounted five-star hotel in Italy.

Oh, dear. Okay, such is dark humor on dealing with a story like this. Anyway, out there, I hope you're staying safe and, you know, acting appropriately and making your judgments about those who are in charge of all this in terms of trying to help us deal with a situation that obviously is not very pleasant. You know, this too will pass.

When it will pass, who knows? Will it be in a month, six months, a year? We're getting lots of different predictions on that. But in the meantime, remain calm, remain confident. That's The Bridge for this week. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks for listening to it once again, and we'll see you in seven days. Thank you.