The remonstrations at the boundary help surround a query that we can now start to ask the united states and canada took different methodologies to commerce with the epidemic who wore it better and as the newly drawn districts survive another legal challenge can we begin to see what the midterms will look like today is sunday february 20th 2022 and this is flashpoint hi welcome to flashpoint good to be back with you after a sunday off last week to make way for the olympics but here we are on the 20th of february and we are suddenly hearing people daring to ask an enticing but fraud question have we reached the end of the pandemic as many health experts predicted the massive omicron surge has subsided,
And we see case numbers dropping dramatically it is probably too soon to start dancing in the end zone but we see the foot coming off the break in a number of ways including in michigan the advice on wearing masks in public places and in schools and little by little like storm victims heading outside to inspect the damage we'll start assessing what we got right and what we got wrong in dealing with something for which there really wasn't much modern precedent as we watched the protests that shut down the ambassador bridge i found myself thinking about the two different laboratories,
That were operating side by side the american and the canadian versions of responding to the coronavirus the stereotype here is the canadians are more than willing to fall into compliance and be quite mannered about it i've always joked that canadians are pathologically kind but in those protests we saw a lot of canadians had hit their breaking points on this side of the border the breaking point came much much sooner vaccination rates were fairly equal until canada was able to get more of the vaccine and then they quickly outpaced our vaccine rates they suffered far fewer cases and far fewer deaths despite the fact that there are a lot of similarities between americans and canadians,
Specially when it comes to things like obesity and hypertension so what conclusions can we draw at this point we're going to talk about that this morning and if we are starting to put the pandemic in the rear view mirror rest assured it will remain right there front and center as we head into the midterm elections we'll talk about that too it's all today on flashpoint well the tie-ups at the u.s canadian border created quite a few problems on both sides of the river but also showed us an interesting collision over policies regarding the coronavirus canada has had far fewer cases and far fewer deaths per capita,
But with tighter restrictions and controls that as we saw had some canadians reaching the boiling point well what are we learning about policy and pandemic let's talk about it with dr donald van he's an infectious disease specialist at mcgill university regarded as one of the top epidemiologists in north america and he joins joins us today from montreal and dr jim baker the ruth dowd professor at michigan medicine and the man behind the pandemic pondering blog who we've turned to quite a few times now on the program uh dr van i want to start with you and let's start with whether it feels possible to you to really compare the u.s and canadian responses are we alike enough or are there too many population,
And system differences to be helpful well i have to tell you i think that the differences are pretty uh pretty enormous uh yes we are north american neighbors i've certainly lived in the us and i've had a lot of i have a lot of friends in the u.s but i think that there's several different uh major levels you know first and foremost is our uh you know health care system it's a it's a socialized healthcare system which provides equal access to medical care regardless of your socioeconomic status and of course we also have a different framework for how healthcare is is governed and rolled out and we also have differences obviously in adherence to the public public policies,
We do have uh i was surprised to read though when it comes to demographics we are more alike than not when it comes to things like obesity and hypertension rates a lot of this sort of sort of co-morbidities correct dr van yeah absolutely so our age pyramids are very similar in terms of we have a predominant you know we have a very heavy uh you know of elderly and frail elderly populations both institutionalized and community dwelling we have a lot of similar comorbidity rates the same co-morbidities themselves in terms of cancer and obesity and heart disease um so that in itself certainly doesn't explain the differences we've seen between countries dr baker when you just look at on the face of it canada far fewer deaths far fewer cases per capita uh is it is it just that simple does that mean that canada did a better job of managing this than we did or is it much more complicated than that,
I think if you look at deaths and illness they did a much better job than we did you also look at vaccination rates they were over 80 percent and we were 63 or so i think they did a much better job there but there's one thing that i think they did really well at is the consistency of their response we seem to go back and forth we've led up on restrictions before we got the population vaccinated and that did two things number one it allowed a lot of people to get sick and die but the other thing is it undermined confidence in what the government was doing so that people would see these outbreaks and think well what we're doing isn't working the vaccines must not work and that that unfortunately created a lot of problems when we then tried to backtrack and get people covered interesting point because prime minister trudeau got to lead canada through the whole thing.
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