Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: How Justin McElroy Became a Trusted Source for COVID News in Canada

Episode Date: September 27, 2022

Podcast history is being made here: There are TWO Justin McElroys in this week's episode. We are joined by Justin McElroy, CBC reporter of municipal affairs in Vancouver and British Columbia, as he discusses his role reporting COVID data over the last two and a half years, and the challenges of presenting that information as people seem to be moving on from caring about the pandemic.Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers https://taxpayers.bandcamp.com/

Saw bones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, talk is about books. One, two, one, two, three, four. Hello everybody and welcome to Saul Bones, a a marital tour of misguided medicine. I'm your co-host, Justin McRoy.

And I'm Sydney McRoy. And it's, I mean, it's happening, Sid. I don't know how else to say it, but it's, it's happening. Wow. It's a, this is a very exciting day. Podcast history is being made here. I, I can't not imagine if this episode of the podcast does not have this title, somebody called Guinness because this is, I believe the first podcast in history

that features two Justin McRoy's in the same episode. I think so. I'm thrilled. Definitely the most Justin McRoy's that have ever been in a podcast episode. Easily. Easily. There's one other Justin McElroy that keeps like filling out

insurance applications and trying to buy cars and Missouri and for some reason just keeps putting my name down and my email address. It is, he is a Justin McElroy. He's a valid Justin McElroy. But I think people guess at the name as email address. Now, that's probably Justin McElroy and then they try to figure it out. Oh, they're okay. So he's not trying to... He's using my email address rather than writing his own email address. Oh. Anyway, welcome to from the CBC, Vancouver or British Columbia,

depending the Municipal Affairs Reporter, Justin McElroy. Hello, Justin McElroy. Hello, Justin McElroy. Wow, I cannot believe we're finally on the same podcast. This is fantastic. But after a decade of misplaced DMs and emails and weird jokes, this is it. I've gotten so many fascinating emails about the inner workings of municipal affairs in both Vancouver and British.

British Columbia, thanks to you, Justin, that I've always forward on to you. And I appreciate I have not forward on nearly as many DMs about Mountain Dew Dorito chips or chili flavored Oreos or whatever the heck else it is that you get excited about on one of your 70,000 podcasts. And I apologize for not communicating all of those, but there's so many. And you have such fans with such weird food tastes that I don't want to overburden you anymore than you are.

Yeah, the signal to the voice ratio is. Are they like 50% serial? And then I imagine like, I don't know, another 25% haunted dolls. Yeah, no, I've got enough of you. This is, I don't, and I'll have to be honest, I don't know, another 25% haunted dolls. And then you just... Yeah, no, I've got an nephew. This is, I don't, and I'll have to be honest, I do not listen to my brother and my brother and me, but I feel that I get an arc of what is being discussed

and what are your bits based on the intensity and the selection of DMs that happen. I don't, well, I don't read all of your reporting on municipal affairs and things. That's fair. We're pretty strong. So we are, we specifically wanted to have you on the show, not because of the incredible power of your name,

but also because you have filled a lot of your hours in the past few years reporting on the COVID pandemic, specifically from kind of a data perspective. Where did you, let's take it back a little bit. How did you, what did you get started reporting, what was sort of your beat before all this happened? Yeah, so just, I was not as maybe some of your fans that think of me and sometimes a message, a Vancouver crime reporter that always looks at bodies in sewer holes.

But I was a, I was just a local news general assignment reporter for a while, and then I turned into a municipal fair supporter, which basically covering city halls across the province of British Columbia here, and you know, property taxes and potholes and people trying to ban pigeons from backyards and things like that. But I'd always done a bunch of things with charts and stats. I always found it interesting where you could insert them into stories and people would reveal things about it that were a little bit more quantitative as opposed to qualitative it creates gives the story a little bit more

authenticity and legitimacy if you're saying hey this is what it's like compared to everywhere also when politician a is saying our taxes are too high or too low you can say well actually here's a chart and here's where it shows so that was always sort of interesting to me and then then in March, early March 2020, I was in early contact with someone who might have had COVID, and I was sent home from our newsroom for two weeks. About a week before, it started becoming a global pandemic. And I started to think of, well, what can I do to be helpful in this situation? I can't do my regular job for two weeks, and this looks like it's going to be an ongoing thing and at the time in british columbia we work is starting daily reports on this pandemic and

there would be and it's very depressing to to to say this is like there would be two cases a day or three all and then one day it's but it's picked up to six uh... but this was that and it wasn't really being collated anywhere by the government or shown in a visual way. And so I said to my boss, what if I try doing this for a little bit? And we'll just see if it's useful, we'll see how the audience reacts, and we'll just do

it once a day. And they said sure. And from doing it once a day and saying we'll see how far goes went from eighteen months were literally every single day that the data was delivered which was either five or six days a week uh... that was my job uh... delivered showing that data doing five or six or seven charts showing what it meant uh... to an increasing number of british Colombians as things went things went along and it very quickly morphed into my full-time job, which was a huge change from what it was before, but something that deeply

mattered to a lot of people. Right. And I mean, it's interesting to sort of reflect back on this because I don't know if you heard, but COVID is actually over here. Yes. Our president decided, I don't know, do you all still have it? Because we, I don't know do you are you all still have it because we did that would still prom in can that but it is right now i didn't know that that president could just declare that right i mean it is it is very much here as well you get the sense at this point that for most people does is no longer a matter of daily concern. Everything is reopened except weirdly. The Pacific buffet on BC Ferries is one of the few things still closed that used to be a thing. But for the most part, you know, you will still see

on the streets I would say about 5 to 10% of people wearing masks in crowded buildings or various or buses masks are still recommended and you will see maybe 30 to 60% of people wearing masks depending on the situation and the bus and so forth. The culture has been different here in Canada all throughout the pandemic, just in terms of the number of people buying into health regulations. But in terms of a clarity of statement from our Prime Minister or Premier, no, that hasn't happened.

Although you can certainly see, even compared to three or four months ago, there's been a big shift in terms of how people are reacting. It's really weird for me to think. So I'm currently doing one of my stents in the hospital. I periodically will work in our local hospital, taking care of patients there. And it really feels like people have just stopped thinking about it.

And no one is concerned anymore. So taking back to that beginning phase, Justin, how did you step? I remember, and I'm sure a lot of people have this experience of especially pre-vaccines sort of obsessively refreshing our county, actually, it was the state, right, website that would show the cases. Initially, the state before the county got rolling. Yeah, the state website, like every single day, as the new reports come in, we were absolutely beholden to that data. How did you, how did you sort of process that

early data where it's, it's, there's so few cases coming in and watching it balloon. What was it like in the in the early days? Yeah. And to your point, there's Sydney. There's 305 people in hospital in British Columbia at this moment with COVID and that normalization both that normalization of that number and just the fact it shows itself in all sorts of ways both in that we don't talk about those daily numbers. It's now weekly and BC as much and it just gets flat lined in and to people don't think about it. But to your point, Justin, when it started, it was very scary and uncertain in a sense of nobody knew where these numbers would go.

And it was the people's only way of really understanding what was happening at the time. You know, the thing that I always talk about when we say how did people wrap their heads around this is traditionally in the news, right, when there's a story, it's about a person, and they have something and they talk about how it impacted them, and we see them on the TV or we talk to them, and it's very individual focus. But at the beginning of the pandemic, you know, you couldn't go into someone's house and film them and say how they were feeling.

It was something that was spreading invisibly in a sense. And so people had no conception of how bad it would get and what does 10 cases mean in a day? What does 50 cases mean in a day? What does 100 or 200? And what does that mean for my sense of, are things getting better or worse? Or my chances of getting COVID, you know, I would have so many questions that would come in every day in the first few months of people asking, is it safe for me to do this activity, or is

it safe to me to do that activity? And I would have to say, you know, I am, I report on city halls, right? I am looking at the numbers and I can show you the trend line and I can tell you better than most, you know, are things on an okay trajectory right now or things spinning out of control. But people wanted all sorts of certainty about what was happening where we were going and what their individual risk level was. That was just impossible to provide. And like you said, once people started getting vaccinated, I think it stopped mattering as much sort of those daily numbers

coming in sort of like the stock market each day. It just receded as, okay, that's interesting, but during that time where people couldn't do that and folks were still wrapping their head around basic knowledge of how this transmitted and what the symptoms were, the numbers were all people had. And if you were dealing with the numbers every day, it meant people really cared about what you were saying and how you were communicating it. But I always try to remind people, look, this is an important part of the story. It's a part of the story that we can tell in a better way compared to past plagues and pandemics because

health reporting is just much more advanced and digitized than it was then, but it's only one section and so there's only so much we can extrapolate from that. It was interesting to watch. So the way that we did it here in West Virginia, our state came up with its own color-coded risk assessment system. Oh, really? Yes, and it was actually different from the CDC's color-coded risk assessment system? Oh, really? Yes, and it was actually different from the CDC's

color coded risk assessment. It was like our own personal. That doesn't sound confusing at all. Well, it was specifically, if you can believe this, it was aimed at trying to not just keep kids in school because the colors were used to decide if in-person school could happen, but also for school sporting events. That was yeah. That was a major concern in our area, was that if the risk color was too high, then we'd cancel high school sports, but if the colors were better, so we invented new colors. In between, gold. Yes, we did. The gold was the color where you can place sports. Gold is the color. That can place for. The old is the color. That's what means it's the best.

Yeah, there were days where you could play sports, but maybe it's gold. But not go to school. And the entire count, I mean, I'm sure this was true across state, the entire county was obsessively watching, like refreshing for the moment that the state would announce each more, the county would announce each morning what our color was, what is our color, what is our county color, and then immediately this social media storm

from angry parents or happy parents or... Right, no one liked what color ended up, that would be a rough day. No, how often did the colors change? I'm curious. It was daily. Oh wow. See, in our province and you know much like in

America this was dealt with you know on a state by state basis in Canada province by province basis we didn't really we didn't have color codes and the this government tried very hard to have a minimal amount of like minor shifts they would do big shifts every once in a while and say these restrictions are now in or left it but they tried not to do regular tinkering. And on one hand, that's sort of good. It gives people certainty. It means that they don't have to wake up every day, stressed. It's like, how is this going to change? Well, Mike, I'll be able to do things. On the other hand, it meant, you know, there would be daily press conferences with our

health minister and our chief medical officer. And people would ask invariably once you've been doing this 200 days in a row, the same sorts of questions with hypotheticals and the health officials sort of went at a certain point, the guidelines we've put in are the guidelines and you need to make your own decision. And so it is an interesting balance of what happens when you try and create, you know, make things more prescribed and try and react day to day and get people on board versus the complacency that can set in when you're not doing that.

And you can tell people well it's the guidelines, but if the guidelines have been the same for three or four months and you don't have special color coating happening, some people are going to get more locks over time. The medicines, the medicines that I skill in my God for the mouth. Most game shows quiz contestants about topics they don't even care about. But for more than 100 episodes, the GoFact yourself podcast has asked celebrity guests trivia about topics they choose for themselves.

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how when you were watching the numbers as this started and things were shifting very rapidly with their times where you felt a sort of when you're watching the actions, maybe public sentiment or the government that just simply was not in line with the data you were seeing. Was it hard to fight the chicken little sky is falling? Situation where you're looking at these numbers and you know what the numbers are saying and you're hearing them interpreted or ignored in different ways. Yes, put it mildly. And this is one of those things where when you have data daily with politicians, it creates that cognitive dissonance.

Because most of the time, a governor or a senator would say, things are looking up in West Virginia. And you can say, well, who's to say, right? But if your premier of your province is saying, as he did in John Horton in the middle of February, when cases were starting to rise, middle of March, when cases were starting to rise quite rapidly in BC, two weeks after they removed some restrictions. People said, John, you just remove some restrictions, people can gather and large groups outside again.

It doesn't this seem wrong given that numbers are rising and he said, I'm confident we're on the right track and he said this and his government said this every day for like two or three weeks, while cases were trying to rise. And as a journalist, where you know, you're caring about balance and keeping your emotions in check.

It was very hard sometimes because you're going, all right, you're displaying the facts and you're displaying them every day and you're pointing out that this is in congruist rhetoric with what they're saying, but at the same time, there's only so much you can do, right? There's only so many times you can say what they're saying is not backed up by the data. And so when they change, eventually after two weeks of it going up, and there were similar times where this narrative would play out, on one hand, it's sort of gratifying that it's like, okay, they're finally looking at the data they're finally listening to what people are saying they put things in place but on the other hand

uh... it's extremely vexing to know in the moment all you can do is just repeat this again and again wall you know trying to remain even keel of it uh... and that's all you can do uh... becate you know we put our faith in these politicians and these public health officials and their meetings that they're having in private where the politics and the health concerns are being debated and balanced and we don't know exactly how those discussions go and our job as communicators at the end of the day we can point out those inconsistencies of uh... but we can't change what's going to happen on the ground and i don don't know if this was true there, but I know here the way that that has kind of played out

is that when I would hear, especially like the governor of our state saying that things were good or things were fine or things were going in the right direction and the numbers said otherwise, you know, or if somebody in the media pointed out that the numbers said otherwise. Usually, now, you're kind of, it's blamed on you being negative or you're hanging onto this, you're clinging to this, that it's for political purposes or to make people look bad or just, I mean, that's usually like, if the, if the local media runs anything about COVID, all of the responses are, why do you have to be so negative and always talk about COVID?

Everything's fine now. Like, oh, I hate this liberal media talking about COVID again. It really is seen as like, well, you only talk about it because you have a bad attitude. You're living in the past. Yeah. And I mean, it has, the dynamic has shifted over time. I would say throughout 2020 and 2021, there was a lot of appetite to be critical of the government when they did this.

When we pointed out that, hey, what they're saying isn't backed up necessarily by the dad in the moment, there wasn't necessarily a lot of pushback. You know, there were some people that were very pro-individual right, shall we say, the entire time that would send the emails and tweets and yell at you. But there was that real buy-in, at least in British Columbia and most Canadian provinces for that. That being said, you know, now, for a lot of people,

I don't do the charts daily anymore. I do them week or a couple of weeks partly because the data only comes out every couple of weeks, but partly because there is only so much new information you can tell people. But even now, when I do them, you get people replying saying, who cares or move on? Or what does this have to do with life right now?

And I'm like, oh, there's still 300 people in hospital. There's still three or four or five people dying a day in our province of five million people. I get that this is not a day-to-day ongoing concern for people anymore. And I think that's the thing that is difficult for some people to wrap their heads around. The difference between, you know, something doesn't have to be a day-to-day. I'm thinking about it constantly in the same way that we

were in 2020, but at the same point, this is still an ongoing concern that you should be thinking about sometimes, certainly, and should be in your brain at least a little dissently at all times. And to point out that it's still happening is not something that is, you know, a stern or offensive statement to make or something that should be triggering, but just a statement on this virus existing and continuing to transmit. No matter how much it is frustrating that that is still the case. Absolutely. You know, something you said struck me about how much data we had, and this being the first pandemic where we had this amount of data being shared

this rapidly. And like, it's fascinating for us because we've talked about pandemics so many times that to live through them and to see how these things happen. And to see stories repeat, you know, even the masking was like 100% out of the playbook of when the pandemic, the pandemic, 1970. What do you see now as having access to the state and reporting on the pandemic? What do you think in a public health crisis like this?

What are the limits of data and what can data do really well for us in a situation like this? I think data can really make stark. So long as it's consistently given and so long as there's a level of detail at a community level that shows that it's, yes, it's in your backyard. It makes it hard for most people to deny its existence, to deny it, or to argue the

fact of whether something is increasing or not. We're very visual people, right? If a blob down the street is fine and everyone on my block is good, then what do I have to worry about? Well, if you have this every day, and it's creeping up, yeah, sometimes people might be skeptical, but as soon as Bob does get it,

you go, okay, well, I guess that data was correct and to have that on a daily basis, and, you know, it's not gonna convince everyone, but I think for a large portion of the population it really helps them wrap their head around things and adjust in a way that is much harder to do or certainly much more emotionally laden if it's all just you're hearing anecdotally what's happening. But in terms of its limits, again going back to the fact that it is not going to tell you everything. It is not going to let you know about a new variant that is coming in and how quickly

it is because it takes health authorities time to start screening for these new variants, for example. There can often be a lag time in terms of how long it gets in. So you might be, you know, it might be two weeks already through your community. And it's only then that the information gets posted to confirm that. And by the same token as well, it's still not going to convince everyone. And you know, we, this is a debate that happens across all sorts of political and policy issues now that there is one group of people that go if we just present the data in a right way, surely people will agree that what we are doing or what we are proposing makes sense.

But I'm not going to point out. But there are some people that are never going to buy in, the way that they come to conclusions, spreadsheet is not going to help, and B, the thing is there can always be different data points, right? There would be times during this pandemic that I would say, look, the overall, like, hospitalizations across the province are down 20% in the last month. Things are looking sort of good and somebody would say, well, what about this, right?

Hospitalizations in this specific place, or I'm seeing over the last two days, the total number of daily admissions go up in these places. And I would say sometimes it's like, look, those are certainly points that you can make an argument that things right now are getting worse or if it blip getting better depending on what they're showing. And everyone can interpret things a little bit differently.

And so there's not just like this King Data Crown that is going to get everyone on side with the same framework. How did you- Oh, sorry, guys. You know, worries me now is our number, I mean, they're still reporting our numbers to some extent. We still get like the county alerts, but they're not colors now. It's like high, medium or low.

So we still get that, but so many people started doing home testing and there's so much, on one side, I'd say there's still shame associated with getting COVID, people who don't want to admit that they did because then it somehow reveals that they broke some sort of guideline. And then on the other hand, there are people who don't want anyone to know that they have COVID or their child has COVID or whatever because they need to go to work or they need their kid to go to school and they can't afford to be out for it. And then there are a lot of people who just want, I mean, I have patients who refuse to get tested

because they don't believe it's real, they don't want the test, they think it's fake. And so because of all that, I feel like we never really know how many people actually have COVID at any given time. And I mean, we're moving to a point now in the US where they're starting to talk about, well, no more free testing. We're going to have to end that. So everybody's going to have to pay for testing moving forward. No more free vaccines. That's not true yet. But at some point, I mean, eventually, that's in the U.S., eventually, this stuff will become for profit. And then what we do, I mean, I know. See, over here, medicine is, I know you're thinking medicine, that's a free thing. We have a segment, we have a, at our ad break during our show, we call it the billing

department and that's because in the US. Justin if you could go back to yourself with everything you've learned and talk to yourself for a couple of minutes right at the beginning of all this, like what do you wish that you had known then? What would you wish you could pass on? I wish I could have told myself, you know, this would be two and a half years. Uh, yeah. Well, a natural law, just before you say that, are you sure?

Are you sure that Justin then wants that in for, I remember looking at people saying, like 12 to 18 months and thinking like absolutely no way on earth is this 12 to 18 months You know, I Yes, there is that risk. However, I go, you know if I've known that then maybe Some of you both my thought process of how long this would take but also the way I communicated it where it's like You know a lot of us went once the vaccines are in place things will be fine Right, you're quote fine And then when it's not and you go, okay, once we get through this fair once we get through the Delta variant

Things will be fine and that's because it seems like it But it's just to have more skepticism and caution in how you're communicating it people both so they don't get false hope and be and how you're communicating it to people both so they don't get false hope and be so, you know, people don't become more cynical about the virus over time and, you know, well, we're all going to get it and it's going to be here forever, so why should I care? Even a little bit about trying to protect myself. That's one thing that would have been helpful to think about early on. And then, you know, the other thing is to just block out much more the amount of anxiety and people yelling at you one way or the other about how you should be looking at the pandemic differently, right? And it was, you know, I went from someone that people cared about a little bit if they cared about local politics or thought it was funny that I had the same name as a famous podcaster

to someone that lots and lots of people in this province suddenly started caring about when he would put out the charts and what he was saying about how the pandemic was going. And you start looking at too many replies and start debating with people a little bit too much and knowing, okay, this is a health crisis. This is not something where I need to have online brainworms of arguing with folks. Knowing early on that, yeah, this is going to last a bit. There's going to be all sorts of people with all sorts of arguments and anger and anxiety

towards this the entire time. You've got to be able to dispel that way and focus on, what can I say about the numbers and the data, how can it help people, what limitations there are, and block everything out. What have made the job just, you know, like 10% more peaceful over the last two and a half years, who can say?

Well, hopefully you can say, you're the data guy. You should be able to say exactly how much. Do you, now, are you tracking like we do here, how many people are vaccinated, how many people, what percentage of this area you're following all that too? Because that's been a struggle here. So West Virginia, our state jumped out ahead once the vaccines were available and we had

the, we were like vaccinating people at that fastest rate, which even, I mean, and not just your number, we have a very small population, but our rate was really good and we were top of the nation. So actually, it's an insert with your province. It's right around that, right? Like, we got to about, so we got to about like, 9v3, 94% for first doses. Wow.

Oh my gosh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We jumped out in the lead, but it's because we were incredibly efficient at delivering vaccines, not because we had a population that was accepting of vaccines. We are now, if not 50th, we're very low. Where, yeah, we're 58th.

So you started off with a bang and then, but the second tier of people that might have been persuaded, were not exactly persuaded. Yeah, we vaccinated everybody who would accept it and then no one else has accepted it. And so we dropped to the bottom of the list. Yeah, no. vaccinated everybody who would accept it and then no one else has accepted it. So we dropped to the bottom of the list.

Yeah, no. And so one thing that's been interesting here is our first dose pick up was about 93% or so. But our second dose won about 89 or so, but then third dose, which happened post-omacron, was 53%. So suddenly, only about 60% of people that got that second dose got a third one. And now at the fourth, we're in the middle of doing that right now, but it's only at 9.63% it's very slow there. And so it shows sort of like in real time and cycle after cycle just how many people feel getting an additional boost is important to them. Despite the fact

that all scientific literature shows that it helps with your immunity and that there is a serious drop off somewhere between three to six months down the line from your past dose. And so yeah, so that's what worries me going forward. Yeah, and to give you an example. So currently, West Virginia is sitting at 64% have had one dose and we've got 55% who they're saying are fully vaccinated, but I guarantee you they just mean two doses when they say fully vaccinated. We say primary series now.

And then we have that on the first and second one. And it's one thing right now for us to look around and say, yeah, there's a few more people sort of, because Zick, every once in a while, and it's not great, but we can go through this. But if another variant comes along that is more dangerous and transmissible than a BA5, then how hard is it going to be to rebuild that faith with people to take the public health measures that were so crucial in the first wave? And that's, I don't know the answer for that when I start thinking about the potential answer.

It makes me pretty depressed. And, you know, hoping that the worst thing doesn't happen has been a pretty poor strategy over the past few years in many countries. Yes. Justin, it has occurred to me while we were recording this show, because largely because of how often we've talked about disease in the history. Like, it occurred to you, does it, has it occurred to you the fact that like you are you are creating the sort of data that people in the future Will look to to like contextualize this whoever does this podcast in a hundred years

200 years, yeah, but have it did I know that obviously I was a reporter for several years, so like I know that it's very much a day-to-day job. But have you taken any time to sort of reflect on the fact that you're creating a little bit of history right now? Oh yeah, I mean like there's, I have an agreement with the biggest universities in BC that I'm just going to give them all of my spreadsheets at the end of this. A weird thing because our province has been very bad at sort of like publicly making a lot of this data accessible in ways that aren't just like PDFs or little like in folk chart in program charts is that it is strange that it is me providing this to universities and

not you know a 40 built in dollar government, but that's neither here nor there. Um, just you. So, you know, you're aware of that, that it's going to be used in the future, and then, you know, it's the, when you're doing something every day in a very sort of repetitive way, you realize by, you know, day 100, 200, certainly by 500, 600 or so, that it's like this is a diary in its own way, right? It's not a long-form book, it's a lot of pictures and snarky sides

about weird things that politicians are saying in the moment, but it is a compendium that you're vaguely aware that it's like, yes, you know, a few PhD students are going to use for their thesis five, six, ten years from now. And that's strange that, you know, as you said, as a journalist, you're in the day-to-day and then you move on to the next thing. But it, you know, it makes you realize, and it has been strange, you know, in my personal life when the rare time that Someone will want to shout with me on the street or whatever

It suddenly went from that was a funny story you did about city hall or I disagree with you on what the third best hamburger in Vagfritz because I rank things as well But instead just thank you for the charts, right? and things as well, but instead just thank you for the charts, right? And it is a strange place to be as a journalist to know that you are providing that's real first draft of history in a capital H way, but also it's very gratifying to know that you're helping people. More sense of the world, that's part of the reason why we get into this. You mentioned moving on to the next thing as we've alluded to sort of interest in following cases and things like that daily is starting to wane. Have you started to pivot to other assignments at

this point or do you know what the future looks like for you right now? Yeah, I mean, over the last year, it has been sort of a slow pivoting back to my job uh... as municipal fair supporter uh... there is this is my story over there during cove they were just going hog wild without adjusted mackerey type to keep an eye on it i mean there was a honestly there was a little bit where i've i did feel guilty that it's like there's a bunch of council meetings that ordinarily i would be at and they are discussing things and passing some stuff and probably saying some stupid stuff that it's not getting done,

but you go, this is more important. And there were times that I had conversations with my bosses where they're like, no, we need you on the pandemic stone, it's like, you know, what I can't really argue with that. Now, you know, again, while I can tell myself, you know, there's local election on October 15th, and there's so many municipalities here, and it's important to break that down. This is still going on, and there are still

giant issues with our provincial government when it comes to transparency and real issues with you know in Canada in many provinces right now there are big doctor shortages there are big nursing shortages there are big paramedic shortages and it's because so many people have gotten burnt out and left the profession over especially in the last year or so they went all right I got over the hump over the worst of the pandemic i need to do something that else and it's creating ongoing strains and those are stories worth uh... telling still uh... and the fact that

there are others things that i want to report on that my skillset can be worked on is something that causes some angst when it's slowly you go for the course of a year from you know it's 80% pandemic one month to like 75% the next and then down and down and now it's really only about 10 to 15% of my time. It makes it easier to deal with that but people are still getting second it's still something you think about. Well I appreciate you doing that because I leading a team of medical students and residents

through the hospital who are already burnt out and they haven't even embarked on their careers in our understaffed hospital and screaming in the hallways, COVID is still happening. How does no one know? I really appreciate that you're telling that story because it feels that way, especially a lot in the work that I do that not all of us in the medical profession are doing, that the pandemic just kept going,

except nobody was paying attention anymore except us, because that's our job too. Yeah. And the split between people that have to care and react to it every day versus the vast majority of people that desperately, mentally want it to move on for all sorts of valid reasons. But when you, I can't imagine, when you don't have that choice,

nine to five, it must create such a weird and sometimes disheartening mental split. And absolutely. And we're seeing the same thing. We just can't get things done in the hospital the way we use to because we are so chronically understaffed on every level. Justin, what's the best way for people to find your work out there? They can go to, I don't know if you you know this justin but i have a website called just in macroid dot com oh yeah i know a little something about it uh... that that that that might have come up uh... that they can go to cbc dot c a slash bc if they see any stories about

local politics chances are i have written it uh... they can also check me out on the poison machine known as twitter dot com at j underscore maclory uh... you you have done a better job than me have dissociating from that website uh... and kudos on that uh... and i'm also on tiktok as the other just in maclory because sometimes up that is too good pass up thank you so much for joining us today and i think you i really enjoyed this for listening.

We will be back with you next week. Thanks to taxpayers for using their song. Medicines is the intro and entrepreneurial program and thanks to you for listening. We'll be back next week until then. My name is Justin McRoy. I'm Cindy McRoy. And as always, don't draw a hole in your head. Alright! Comedy and Culture.

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