Jordan: I’m going to start by just admitting it. I used to be a reporter and I have no idea how the hell I would do that job right now. And Claire, you used to work in a newsroom too, so I think you know what I’m talking about.
Claire: Yeah. And I’m with you. I cannot imagine doing that job right now.
Jordan: There’s just too much to handle. This story is everywhere and I don’t know enough about it. I don’t have the experience. I would find it impossible to sort out what’s critical from what’s just really important, to what’s also important and what’s probably still important, but it can wait because everything else is more important. There’s just, there’s too much information, there’s too many sources, and there’s too many angles to cover.
Claire: Yeah, and never mind all the information. I mean, everything is constantly changing. And being in a newsroom is a tough job in general, but I’m so impressed by what newsrooms are doing across the country right now.
Jordan: I mean, the beauty of this podcast is that we just do one story. We find one person who can hopefully give us the proper insight or some inside knowledge or the big picture context, and we talk to them and hopefully they’ve done the impossible job that I just described, and we benefit from it. And that’s one story.
Claire: Yeah. And I mean. Think about it. I don’t, I don’t think our listeners even realize that. We just do one story and we try to find a one person to talk about that one story. And even that can be a challenge. Don’t you agree?
Jordan: We go back and forth across our list of topics every day. And right now it just feels like every one of them is urgent. And I’m not sure how to parse that except to go to the people that do know what’s important, and what can wait. And so today we’re going to go to one of our favorite guests who we haven’t talked to in a while because she’s been insanely busy. And her beat, which was always an important one, is probably now the most critical reporting job there is. And so I’m hopeful that she can kind of help us sort out what the defining stories of COVID-19 in Canada are shaping up to be. What we’ll remember about this time when this is all over. And she’s also hopefully going to tell us how the hell you can stay afloat in the middle of this storm. And so we’ll do that right after Claire, I know we just talked about the impossible job. You get to do that for one minute and give us the most important stuff going on right now.
Claire: Yeah, definitely not the same as the hard work done by journalists following this 24/7 but we do our best to keep you informed. Well we may not know when restrictions will be eased in Canada just yet, but Justin Trudeau is now saying that it’ll be done in a phased approach. And he also says it’s not going to happen anytime soon.
News Clip: We are having ongoing discussions with the provinces at this point. We recognize that different regions of the country are at different places along the evolution of their COVID-19 curve. We’re going to make sure that we try to stay coordinated as best as possible, but those discussions are ongoing about how we’re going to reopen the economy. It’s just that it’s going to be a while still.
Claire: Trudeau also addressed longterm care homes and senior facilities, which as we know have been hit especially hard across the country. He says the government is talking to provinces about staffing shortages and what needs to be done. And one thing happening in Quebec that Trudeau has pointed to is a salary top up for employees. Now many of the crises at these facilities have just been worsening over the past few days. Anson Place care center in Hagersville, Ontario, for instance, has now seen 19 deaths related to COVID-19, and 73 of the 101 residents have tested positive for the virus. A couple of provinces have now ramped up testing. Alberta is now testing for anyone who has symptoms, including a fever, runny nose, sore throat, cough or shortness of breath. And New Brunswick is also expanding its testing criteria, so now anyone who has two out of five symptoms can be tested. As of Tuesday evening, over 27,000 cases of COVID-19 in Canada with 952 deaths.
Jordan: I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings, and this is The Big Story. Carly Weeks is a health reporter at The Globe and Mail, and she must be incredibly busy right now. Hi, Carly.
Carly: Hi there.
Jordan: First of all, just how are you doing these days?
Carly: Well, yeah, that’s an interesting question for all of us these days. You know, I think we’re all, to varying degrees, dealing with a lot of inconvenience. Some people are really suffering. So, you know, we’ve been working from home, my husband and I, for several weeks with our toddler, which has many challenges when you’re trying to do, you know, journalism on a daily basis and breaking news files that won’t wait until nighttime or anything like that. So it’s a struggle, but, you know, it doesn’t take long, I mean, I’m talking to people all the time who are, you know, responding to this in hospitals and working on the front lines. So it puts it in perspective. You know, that we’re lucky enough to be able to stay home and actually have jobs right now. So it’s all relative.
Jordan: Yeah. And I mean, from a journalistic perspective, one of the reasons we wanted to talk to somebody whose beat is normally health, is because there are a lot of people whose beats aren’t normally health, who are now covering this, cause it’s the only story. What would you say has been the most challenging thing for you to navigate in terms of there just being so many angles to this and so much information out there and figuring out what to cover?
Carly: That’s an interesting question. I think there’s a number of things that have emerged as big challenges, and one of them, you sorta touched on, the fact that everybody is now sort of an expert in this and everybody wants more information all the time. So what we’ve seen happen is that some less than credible stories and experts have emerged, who are kind of distorting the picture maybe of what’s going on. You know, there’s some, a couple of prominent people on Twitter who have emerged as sort of media experts, more so in the United States that are being quoted all the time, but a lot of the, you know, the studies that they’re citing and the things that they’re saying aren’t necessarily rooted in truth. And there’s so much of this sort of misinformation and, you know, people throwing around things that aren’t true. And, you know, social media is obviously playing a role in this, and, you know, we’re trying to everyday just tell people what they need to know, press public health officials on, you know, what’s going on and what’s going wrong with the response. So we were trying to deal with, you know, not falling into these minefield of bad information and science that’s coming out that just isn’t even credible. But at the same time, trying to figure out what are the most important points and what might we be missing, you know? One of the things that’s become really clear is that we really have a problem with information sharing in Canada. And that sounds very, very boring. What that really means is that for the most part, most of us don’t have a very good idea of what might be going on with COVID-19 in our communities. That’s emerged as a theme in places like Ontario and Quebec, which probably not coincidentally, are also facing some of the largest outbreaks in the country. And they’re facing some of the largest struggles in Canada to get them under control. They’re not very good at telling people what’s going on, and that’s become a very big challenge from a journalistic standpoint, just trying to even get the most rudimentary information out to people that they really need to know about. Where the outbreaks are, who’s dying, what they need to know.
Jordan: I wanted to ask you about that because I see these numbers every day and I’ve just decided kind of, because it’s not my job to pick one source and use that as a benchmark day to day. But I see you guys at the Globe and people at the Star and other publications around the country kind of parse these numbers. So you’re getting one number, to use Ontario as an example, from the province. And then health reporters, or just reporters, I guess are going out to individual public health units. And they’re adding up those numbers, and they sometimes don’t add up. And it just leaves me, as an observer, feeling like I’m not sure who’s telling me the truth, or even if there is an agreed upon basis for a case.
Carly: It’s very strange. It feels like there’s this bit of a paternalistic theme that’s emerged. You know, I’ve been tuning in more so to the Ontario press briefings because there’s been so many problems in Ontario, frankly, and you often will get this response, well, you know, we’re not doing a certain thing because that’s not necessary. That’s not what the evidence says. But then the premier will say, but that is actually what we want. I mean, yesterday was a good example. We had the premier calling for more testing of people in longterm care homes, and you know, minutes later, one of the chief public health officers in the province said, well, no, that would be wasteful. You know, and so there’s people that are contradicting each other there. They don’t appear to be using the same sort of evidence bars that they are in provinces like Alberta and BC that have been really proactive and gotten this information and gotten these outbreaks largely under control as of today. So there is a lot, it’s raised a lot of questions about why there is this lack of transparency. Is it that they’re not collecting the information themselves, that they don’t have timely access, that they’re concealing things? Because basically what we’re finding out is, as reporters, we’re having to go to 34 public health units in Ontario and ask them what’s going on in your area? And they’re telling us, and then it doesn’t match up to what the province is saying at all. So it undermines or risks undermining faith in the system at a crucial time when we need more than ever to trust in public health.
Jordan: How do you go about figuring out which experts to trust on this? And maybe you have sources that you’ve cultivated for a long time, but I know, from my perspective, some of the experts that we’ve interviewed, who we’ve had on before and trust them, they just talk about armchair epi’s or people who, like you mentioned, are now all of a sudden showing up on Twitter and pitching themselves as sources and ending up in articles. And how do you fact check that in real time?
Carly: That’s a, it’s a really good question and it’s emerged as a really important one, particularly because Canada’s not facing one uniform outbreak. We have regional outbreaks that are going on that look very different, and so we have to take great pains to not only get people with credible, good, solid information, but people who can speak to experiences in various parts of the country. Because when I interview someone in Toronto, the information that they’re giving me is very different from someone in Alberta. And that was the experience I had just a few days ago. You know, in Alberta, they’re already sort of approaching this idea of when can we maybe start talking about opening our society back up. In Toronto and Ontario, we’re not nearly there yet. So when it comes to sort of fact checking these sources and, you know, getting the right people on the phone, you know, there are a number of people, like I’ve been lucky enough to be a health reporter for, you know, over 10 years. So there’s a number of people that I know and trust, and I’ve talked to them before and they’ve held senior positions for a long time. And they know their stuff. I mean, some of the people we talked to regularly responded to the SARS outbreak. They know what this looks like. They deal with pandemics all the time. And other people, some of them are sort of new to me, but they’ve come up because they are, you know, on the front lines now. They’re sort of becoming the new leaders who are responding to this, you know, in real time in some of the big centres where we are seeing a lot of cases. And so, I think one of the main things, it comes back to journalism 101, you never want to talk to just one source. You need to get multiple people talking about the same thing. And then I think it does become clear quite quickly who is credible, and that’s really one good way to fact check. Because if one person is telling you something and it is so far out from what others are saying, and it doesn’t make any sense with what the data is showing or with what other public health people are saying, then you might want to start raising some questions. You know, is this person’s expertise really all, you know, all that it’s cracked up to be? And it could be that they’re ahead of the curve and they know something that we don’t. But I find that talking to multiple people and reading as much as possible is a good way to root out, you know, who’s giving good information and who might not be.
Jordan: Well if parsing misinformation and getting reliable numbers is kind of one of the main narratives, what else is emerging in your mind as one of the bigger storylines, either in terms of where we’ve really succeeded or where Canada’s really struggled to contain this? What are we going to remember about this time?
Carly: Yeah. Well, I think that a particular narrative has started to emerge in the last week or so. You know, we haven’t seen our hospitals overrun. We’re not seeing the type of surge that there was in New York City or Italy. And I think that there’s already this pushback that’s started, a lot of people are starting to question, why are we staying home? Our economy’s ground to a halt. So I think that there’s– a lot of people may come out of this thinking, this thing was all overblown, and all of this was unnecessary. And I think that that’s very mis– it’s a misguided view. The reason why our hospitals aren’t being overrun is because most of us are staying home and doing all of the things that public health is asking us to do right now. The other part of that narrative though, the really concerning part, and it’s just starting to emerge more and more, is that our vulnerable communities are really at risk. And we don’t seem prepared, or have a great way to protect them. And I’m particularly talking about, you know, seniors living in longterm care homes. People who are living in group homes, people who are disabled, people who are homeless, people who are addicted to substances. We’re seeing more and more of these pockets of people who are testing positive, showing up sick, and that would include, you know, newcomers to Canada, people who have English as a second language, anyone who kind of is maybe marginalized in some way. I think what’s becoming clear is that we’ve done a great job of protecting a certain portion of society, maybe people who are able to stay home, you know, and work from home and all of those sorts of things and follow the public health directives. And then there’s this other group who, you know, maybe they live in housing situations where they’re continuously exposed to others or they’re working in jobs, you know, for minimum wage and they have to keep showing up and they don’t really have any options and they’re being exposed to other people, or again, with longterm care and other sort of at risk group homes, there’s just so much spread that’s going on there. And I think what’s going to come out from this is that we need to really do such a much better job of protecting those vulnerable groups in our society. And we really aren’t doing that now at all.
Jordan: Can you tell me a little bit about what is going on in longterm care facilities? Cause you and what I guess was a team of reporters from the Globe across the country put together like the scope of it, and it was pretty staggering.
Carly: It is. Staggering is a very apt word for this. So, and again, it’s very difficult to get information from some provinces, but we basically did a cross country scan of what the situation is. And what’s very clear is that longterm care centres are the epicentre of outbreaks in Canada of COVID-19 in Canada. They are in some ways, you know, some of the people at these homes are sort of sitting ducks. You know, it reflects longstanding problems with the way that these homes have sort of been the way they’ve worked in the way–
Jordan: Can you explain that a bit?
Carly: Yeah. Well, so there’s, I guess there’s a number of issues or short term issues and then longer term issues. The short term right now, you know, a lot of staff members who work in longterm care weren’t given masks and gloves, and people who had symptoms for COVID weren’t getting tested right away. And Oh, it turns out that seniors who are sick and old and living in homes don’t have the same symptoms as everyone else, and they manifest differently. And so basically there was a number of red flags that kind of just made it so that there was all of these different outbreaks and illnesses popping up across the country. We now have hundreds of facilities, like hundreds of facilities, with outbreaks and hundreds of deaths as a result, and it’s causing our overall mortality related to COVID in Canada to rise. So a lot of concerns there. Longer term issues, this is something that’s been going on for a long time. Seniors in longterm care facilities die every year from things like the flu. And we kind of accept that as a given. You know, that they’re going to die, and flu season is particularly hard on seniors. And I don’t think any of us have done a very good job, or at least most of us, haven’t done a good job of asking why that is. Why is it that seniors in longterm care facilities are multiple people in one room? You know, why does the province continue to allow that? We know that that’s a huge risk for spreading of infection. And in fact, that’s one of the reasons why hospitals have largely, well, for the most part, moved away from that. There is still some room sharing in hospitals, which is a problem as well. But I was on the phone with someone the other day, an infection control expert who said, the funny thing is that hospitals– you’d think that hospitals would be sort of the scary place to be right now during the midst of a pandemic, but it’s actually longterm care facilities. Hospitals know how to control the spread of infection. But in longterm care facilities, that’s really not happening very much or very well at this point for the most part. And you know, in some provinces they’ve taken over the staffing of longterm care facilities and others, like Ontario, they’re still resisting doing widespread testing of residents and staff. And so it’s a real mess all over the place. And it speaks to the need for institution-wide change.
Jordan: Is it too late for us to do anything in the short term that could help right now? I mean, you mentioned that it’s already in hundreds of homes across the country.
Carly: You know, you never want to say it’s too late. I mean, unfortunately there are homes where there’s like dozens of people have already died and there’s more that have been testing positive. A colleague of mine, Andre Picard, wrote a column, you know, last week I think it was, actually saying, if you have a loved one in longterm care, get them out now if you can. And he faced a lot of blow back for that. But it turns out, as usual, Andre was right. You know, I mean, it’s such an impossible situation for people to be in. But that being said, there is always hope for turning things around. And we can look at some successful provinces and figure out what they’ve done and how they were able to manage that spread. So, you know, a province like BC, they moved very quickly to take over the staffing for these homes. Because they knew that the staff members weren’t necessarily getting the training they needed. The funding models weren’t necessarily in place to, you know, incentivize the homes to make sure things were being done properly. You know, making sure everyone had the gloves, gowns, and equipment that they needed. So there’s things that can and should be done. And I do think that there’s a way to turn this around. I think that one of the things that’s emerged from health experts is that we need to start looking at places that don’t yet have outbreaks with no positive cases, and focus on those as potential hotspots. Anywhere could have a potential case and let’s do more testing. Let’s test people without symptoms even. That’s something that’s been floated, you know, and get everyone tested all the time. As testing becomes more available and we know these people are vulnerable, why aren’t we doing these things to protect them?
Jordan: When you see governments respond to these kinds of questions, do any of them give off a sense of taking a more longterm view on this? Because like you said, it’s been a problem for ages, or is it just now about putting out fires and we’ll worry about the rest later?
Carly: I get the sense overwhelmingly that it’s about putting out the fires. You know, we’re in crisis mode, let’s handle this crisis right now, and then we’ll maybe deal with it later. And I think the concern there is that, you know, if you only take the short term view, perhaps none of these things will be changed. I mean, these longstanding issues need to be addressed. Take something as simple as room sharing in a longterm care home. You know, these homes would need to be refitted, redesigned. It’s not an easy ask to just, you know, fix that overnight. But the province, every province, has the power to mandate those types of changes, and it would take a lot of political courage and will to actually get that done. I think that the benefit or, you know, if there is one to this situation, is that there’s certainly, it does appear to be more political will to do things now. I mean, we’ve seen all kinds of things happen on such a fast timeline that we have never seen before. I mean, for instance, now, you know, doctors are doing more telemedicine in Ontario. That’s something that we’ve talked about for years and years, and all of a sudden it was done almost overnight with a snap of a finger, and we’re all seeing our doctors virtually, you know, we can do these things and they should be done. They need to be done. We need to, you know, protect those people that can’t protect themselves.
Jordan: As a health reporter for more than a decade, like you said, does it frustrate you when you see these kinds of things that we should be doing, and clearly we can be doing only happening now when there are so many lives at stake?
Carly: It is a bit astonishing, you know? And it sort of speaks to this idea that everything that public health officials or government leaders have thrown at you before really were just a lot of excuses. I mean, certainly there’s things that are very complicated, nd would take a lot of time and legislation to change. And, you know, doing things on the fly is not necessarily a great longterm strategy to, you know, run a country. But it does speak to this idea that we can be a lot bolder and make these changes happen. Things like, you know, making those longterm care institutions safer places, prioritizing the health of seniors and making sure that people are going to be safe where they live. We do have the ability to do it. And I think that there’s going to be a number of changes that come out of this. I mean, a lot of people will be permanently changed as a result of this, and hopefully one of the changes that can come out of this is that we do place more of a priority on public health. We have chronically underfunded, you know, our public health offices. There has been a lots of high profile cuts to public health. And in a crisis situation like this, you start to see just how vital those connections are. How well you fund public health can really make a difference at a time like this. I mean, places like South Korea have been able to flatten the curve and keep disease at bay for a number of reasons, but one of them is that they have a lot of people available who are able to track down new cases, make sure they’re staying isolated. I mean, you can’t contain this disease if you don’t fund the people on the front line who are going to stop it, you know, isolate and make sure people are staying home if they’re sick. And so we need to really do a lot more to fund the things up front to prevent these illnesses. I mean, this is not a surprise. The reason why the movie Contagion was so sort of prescient is not because, you know, the people that wrote it were sort of like fortune tellers. They just talked to some infection control experts and epidemiologists. Like, we knew that this was going to happen, it was just a matter of when. And we’d still didn’t really prepare for it.
Jordan: Well, that is a, an optimistic note to end on. Carly, thank you for helping us today.
Carly: Thank you so much for having me.
Jordan: Carly Weeks is a health reporter at The Globe and Mail. That was The Big Story. For more big stories, we have a website, you might have heard of it, thebigstorypodcast.ca. They are all there. They are also all in your favourite podcast player of choice, on Apple, on Google, on Stitcher, on Spotify, on Podfather, whatever you want to use. And of course if you would like to chat anytime, hit us up on Twitter at @thebigstoryFPN. Finally, if you want to send us a video clip or a voice recorder memo for us to play at the end of these episodes, you can do so by sending it to thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.
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