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The Current Transcript for April 6, 2020

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: You deserve to see the same battle that I see when I'm making decisions. You deserve to know what I know.

MATT GALLOWAY: On Friday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford released what he said was a stark model showing what may happen in that province through the course of this pandemic. The hope is it will encourage people to stay home and prevent the spread of the virus. This morning, a closer look at the reasoning behind releasing those models and why the federal government hasn't done so just yet. Also on this Monday morning, how are you doing and how are your kids doing?

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VOICE: I wish I could go to the playground and eat candy.

MG: How children are interpreting this tough moment and how they might see it in years to come. Also, meet one of the many authors who's helping kids through this by reading to them online. A bit of virtual storytelling coming up. And later, in the face of an incredible challenge, many manufacturers have reinvented themselves for the fight against COVID-19. We'll hear how they did it. Plus, Tom Power talks to songwriter Martha Wainwright about the balcony concerts she's streaming from her Montreal home. We start though with attempts to predict where we'll be in the next few weeks and why not everyone is onboard. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is an extended edition of The Current.

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Federal government doing Canadians a ‘fatal disservice’ by not releasing its COVID-19 projections, says prof

Guests: Amir Attaran, Michelle Driedger

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VOICE: First of all, we can highlight that there has been tremendous transparency on the raw data, on the numbers, on the numbers of cases, on where they are, and we're, of course, adding to and collaborating closely with the provinces on making sure that those numbers get out there.

MG: Politicians can't predict the future of this pandemic, but they can make an educated guess and that is what scientific modelling is for, predicting how many will be infected weeks and months from now. Right now, the prime minister Justin Trudeau is under pressure to share Canada's modelling. Here he is again on that matter.

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VOICE: I think people can imagine a range of scenarios that shows everything from everyone gets suddenly better within the next few weeks to this situation just keeps getting worse and we face a situation like some other countries in the most dire situations have. There is a range out there and just highlighting that range is not as useful or important as being able to get clearer numbers and clearer analysis of what we are likely to face.

MG: In the United States, President Donald Trump has released his projections and the same goes for Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who released his province's information on Friday.

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VOICE: I'm in no position to tell the prime minister what he should be doing, shouldn't be doing, and I'm in no position to tell the rest of the premiers what to do. I've just personally feel it's the right of the people of Ontario to know what I know. We're gonna be transparent. We're going to show people the same graphs moving forward that I've been shown and once I see it, one day later, the folks of Ontario will see it as well.

MG: Many people argue that the public has a right to this information and a right to know how bad things could get. Amir Attaran is a professor of law and medicine at the University of Ottawa. Amir, good morning.

AMIR ATTARAN: Good morning.

MG: Ontario has seen its models and forecasts come out the most recent province to do that. B.C. did that more than a week ago. Alberta says it's planning to do this as well. What are we actually learning from these forecasts?

AMIR ATTARAN: What epidemiological models tell us is very much like what a weather forecast ahead of a hurricane tells us. It tells us that in some future time frame, maybe days in the case of weather, but more likely, weeks and months in the case of a disease that we are facing a particular outcome. The hurricane may hit. It may be sunny or front for a disease. The number of hospitalizations may go up or it may hit the turning point and go down, but there is a fundamental difference, Matt, between forecasting the weather and forecasting a disease. And it's this. You can't change the weather, but with disease, My God, have we ever got the ability to change it. In fact, the outcome that Canada faces, how long we're all locked at home, how long we're out of our jobs, how long we go on suffering with this is 100 percent within our hands.

MG: And your sense that if you release those models, that that can help influence that behaviour?

AMIR ATTARAN: Absolutely it can. And you already see people making a variety of choices. Some of them are staying at home. They're not going outside for anything. And others continue to think that they can wander the streets, hang out with their friends. You know, here in Ottawa a few days ago, our bylaw services are our city. Our city services issued warnings to about 200 groups of people in one day.

MG: And we've heard that happening in Toronto and Halifax this past weekend as well. If that modelling can influence that behaviour, why do you think the prime minister has thus far refrained from releasing projections for the entire country?

AMIR ATTARAN: Because I think his judgement is poor. I can't be more blunt about it.

MG: Is it his decision or is he being advised not to do that?

AMIR ATTARAN: Well, who knows? But he's made a very unwise decision of putting himself into it and politicizing the decision. Think about the other forecasts government does. Does the prime minister have to sign off on a weather forecast? Of course not. When stats can does a forecast of Canada's population, does he sign off on that? Of course not. When the Bank of Canada does a forecast of the economy, does he sign off on that? You must be kidding.

MG: The premier of Ontario, when he released Ontario's models, acknowledged a couple of things. One is that to your point, things can change and the models could evolve as time passes, but the other also said this is a quotation, "it could create a panic if we overestimate." Could that lead into why the prime minister might not release these?

AMIR ATTARAN: You know, maybe it does. But if it does, then the prime minister's frankly insulting. We're adults. This is a nation of adults trying its best to get through an extraordinary time and to decide to keep adults in the dark about what the future holds is not only patronizing, but it also makes their lives harder. People want to make plans for the next few months. They want to know which schools reopen. Will I be able to go back to the place that I work? Will I be able to visit my parent who is in a nursing home somewhere? Again, these are things that pull at the family's heartstrings. It's finances. It's day to day life. They cause stress. Ultimately, they'll cause a different sort of problem. Mental health will decline in the face of this uncertainty.

MG: Do you worry about how reliable some of these models might be? In Ontario there's been questions around the number of tests done, but also the huge number of tests that have yet to have results come back and people wonder how accurate the forecasts could actually be. Does it concern you?

AMIR ATTARAN: Well, don't we worry about the weather forecast being wrong sometimes? I mean, everyone has come across a lousy weather forecast. This can or it cannot happen when it comes to diseases. The point is, and I think this is fundamental, that if you forecast you can make decisions about how to behave today to have a better tomorrow. Can I use an analogy to explain this to you? He lives in Canada right now, is stuck in a dark tunnel, and people are wondering, is there a light at the end of the tunnel? And as a scientist, I want to say, yes, there is a light. I see it very clearly, but. The length of the tunnel. How long were stuck in the dark tunnel? How far away that light at the end is. Is 100 percent in our hands. It's up to us. It is up to our behaviour in social isolation mainly and in other things, too. If you give Canadians a model of how far away that light is and you challenge them as adults, brothers and speaking to them as children and tell them, look, if you can just be a bit more isolated, if you can be a bit better behaved, that light comes closer. The tunnel gets shorter. We'll all be getting paycheques again sooner. Will all be seeing our kids play with their playmates again sooner. Don't you think that's a powerful motivation? I think if we put the data out there and we as scientists aren't in mature in how we handle data, we will do our best to explain where the data is fairly sure and where it's a bit warped. And if we put that out there, Canadians will become more engaged with this challenge.

MG: We'll leave it there. Amir, it's good to hear from you on this. Thank you.

AMIR ATTARAN: Thank you so much, Matt.

MG: Amir Attaran is a professor of law and medicine at the University of Ottawa. Whatever the numbers say about the seriousness of this pandemic, how that's communicated to the public may be just as important as the numbers themselves. Michelle Driedger is a professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba, specializes in risk communication, and she's studied how officials and governments communicated about the H1N1 pandemic just over a decade ago. Michelle, good morning to you.

MICHELLE DRIEDGER: Good morning, Matt.

MG: How do you see this, whether the government should embrace that transparency that Amir is talking about and release all the information it has to the public? Is that something that the government should move on now?

MICHELLE DRIEDGER: Well, I think it depends on how you want to look at transparency. There's kind of two main schools of thought. Whether you look at things in terms of a fiscal transparency. So we'll release all information and all data and have people try to make sense of all of that or in a form of reasoned transparency. So where there will be some parameters and things are provided in a much more digestible manner. And it's not just somebody trying to look for the needle in that proverbial haystack.

MG: Is withholding that information paternalistic as Amir is suggesting?

MICHELLE DRIEDGER: I think what we found, what we found during H1N1 is that people had a surprisingly a ability to handle complex information, but it depended on who was providing the information and how credibly they viewed that source. So people could track when there was a single spokesperson who was coming forward and saying on the basis of the evidence that we know today, these are what we are recommending on what Canadians can do to protect protect themselves. And if the evidence changes, we'll come forward and we'll tell you how that influences the recommendations. So your question about, you know, releasing all of the information or all of the models, it depends on, you know, the data that's being used in those models. How clearer are those variables would have been the assumptions that modellers have used in coming up with the different forecasted scenarios, because there's something that very different from when you get a weather forecast wrong to when you get a disease modelling outcome wrong.

MG: You talked about who's delivering it as well. And there is the concern that perhaps some of this is being politicized or there's political considerations at play. Is that an element of this as well, that if you're a politician, you need to stand back and let the scientists present those models? Let the health officials present those models?

MICHELLE DRIEDGER: Certainly that came out during our pandemic H1N1 work. There was often times where people would have a great more confidence in the public health officials, the provincial public health officer or the public health agency lead officer coming forward with information compared to when it was a an elected official. And a lot of our health ministers are quite qualified, but they are elected individuals compared to these, you know, the proverbial top doctors for the provinces and Canada.

MG: One of the things that Amir was talking about was the importance of having this information out in some ways to shape public behaviour that, if we want to use his analogy, gets to the end of the tunnel sooner. That information is going to help us get there. Have a listen to Nicola Lacetera, behavioural economist at the University of Toronto, studied how the public in Italy responded to government messages about social distancing. The work that he did found that people were less likely to follow the rules for things like physical distancing and quarantine when officials kept changing the timelines and pushing the dates week after week. Have a listen to this.

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VOICE: So there is a quite a delicate balance to find for authorities between not being too high expectations and on the one hand, but on the other hand, to keep a little bit morale high by giving people a sense that, you know, at some point we go back to normal. Definitely giving too short end times and moving the goalposts too often might be very frustrating for people because it also reduces the credibility of the policymakers.

MG: What do you make of that, Michelle? In part, it's about what the value of this information is. It's about knowing it, but it's also about how we are going to interpret that is as the public.

MICHELLE DRIEDGER: Well, it's that very fine line between handling uncertainty and complexity in in a highly evolving situation. If things change too frequently without any sense of what is the end outcome, it leads people to start distrusting any information that comes forward. It seems like, you know, public health doesn't know what it's doing. At the same time, we know within research that people do have a capacity for handling bad news. And in some respects, they often will receive bad news with a bit more of a trusting light because it will feel that they're not just being placated with false good news stories. And so handling knowing that there is what the bad news is and how they might be able to try to manage that provides a bit of control in a situation where people don't have a lot of control, but I think it is a very fine balance in how you try to do this.

MG: Well, in part because as you said, forecasting the weather is different than forecasting a pandemic. What happens if you get that balance wrong?

MICHELLE DRIEDGER: Well, you have exactly, you could run the situation of what tthat researcher in Italy found where people start to lose faith in any of the information that's coming forward. They throw their hands up and they figure nuts to death. I'm going to go out, I'm going to go, do I need to return to some form of normalcy? Canadians have a fairly strong sense of deference when our public health officials come forward and say, you know, we really need to try to keep a handle on this. We need to, you know, watch your social distancing. We need to keep that physical distance going, minimise the number of trips out. I think if you start moving that target date of when is that end point in sight? People are going to start wondering, well, what do you guys really know?

MG: Just before I let you go, how would you say, based on the work that you've done, looking at SARS and H1N1, how are public health leaders doing this time around in communicating with people?

MICHELLE DRIEDGER: I think, you know, compared to SARS and H1N1, I mean, every time we've gone through one of these things, things have improved tremendously. I mean, we're hearing about some of our provincial health officers where people want to put them on t-shirts because they're doing such a great job. And I think that's the kind of thing that we need to continue and allow them to think about how do we try to manage that situation. But it's also important to remember people are primed for wanting some kind of information. So deciding how that gets released is an important consideration.

MG: Michelle, great to speak with you. Thank you.

MICHELLE DRIEDGER: Thank you.

MG: Michelle Driedger is a professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba. His family called him a solitary man driven to connect to the world at large. As we told you on Friday, the soul singer, Bill Withers died. He was 81-years-old. One of his hits was "Lean on Me." And that's a song that many people are singing these days to show support for frontline health care workers. And in that spirit, because it makes you feel good on a Monday, here's a bit of Bill Withers.

[Song: "Lean on Me" by Bill Withers]

MG: It's an anthem for all times, but especially these times. Brother Bill Withers, "Lean on Me." The CBC News is next and then South Korea is on its way to easing pandemic measures. Some Swedes say it's time to lock things down in that country. We'll head around the world and look at different COVID-19 strategies. That's when The Current returns in six minutes time. I'm Matt Galloway. Stay with us.

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How South Korea, India and Sweden compare in COVID-19 strategies

Guests: Anthony Kuhn, Rohit Gandhi, Maddy Savage

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

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MG: Still to come, Operation Pivot. How businesses are changing things up to fight COVID-19, but first, different responses to a shared enemy.

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VOICE: This is indeed the most challenging crises we have faced since the Second World War and the one that needs a more a stronger and more effective response. That is only possible in solidarity if everybody come together and if we forget the political games and understand that it is humankind that is at stake.

MG: Emphatic words there from United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, a call for the world to join together against a singular threat. Right now though, countries around the globe are employing varied strategies. So what's working and what's not in our global effort to stop the novel coronavirus? We're going to begin in South Korea, which has become a model for how to tackle COVID-19. Anthony Kuhn is the Seoul correspondent for National Public Radio. Anthony, hello.

ANTHONY KUHN: Hey, nice to join you, Matt.

MG: Thanks for being with us. What is daily life like in South Korea today?

ANTHONY KUHN: Well, it's at a really interesting point, and it's important for other people to watch because they appear to have been through the worst of it. And so where's South Korea is today other countries may be in the coming weeks and months. And their statistics are looking really good. Just to give you an example, for the first time today, they had they had less than 50 new cases. That's the lowest since February. Out of a total of ten thousand cases, more than six thousand have recovered and been discharged. They've tested more than four hundred sixty six thousand people and the mortality rate is under 2 percent. But officials are warning people not to be complacent. And they say that a new wave of infections could spring up if people let down their guard.

MG: And so is it back to normal life right now? Are people out on the streets and doing what they would have done before this apparent?

ANTHONY KUHN: Well, I think it's more that people are going a bit stir crazy, and you have to add to that the fact that it is peak cherry blossom season. And so over the weekend there have just been floods of people into the parks. You have to remember that South Korea was at no time locked down in any way. People were told to do social distancing weight from each other, avoid lots of big events were cancelled. Schools let out. But no, no, cities or regions have been locked down. Not even the epicentre. The fourth largest city of Daegu. So cafes in my neighbourhood have been, you know, not but still plenty of people. And so now the government is worried that people are letting down their guard and they could see a second wave infection. So they also shelved plans to sort of sort of lessen the social distancing. He's off on that. They say it's not time to do it yet.

MG: There was this policy of trace, test and treat that was in operation in South Korea. And a lot of people believe that that's why the country was so successful in its response. What did that look like on the ground?

ANTHONY KUHN: Well, it looked like a country that had learned its lessons from previous outbreaks and it was well-prepared. And the philosophy is quite simply that when you test, you know, who's got it and who doesn't. And when you do that, you do not have to lock down entire region. So when the after the first cases started appearing in January, they readied vaccine as they readied testing centres and test kits. Very, very quickly. And they had a capacity of about 20000 a day up and running, including these drive through test centres. And it requires a whole lot of moving parts, including labs, to test logistics, to move these things around. Government coordination with the private sector. And they did all that to even reconfigure their bureaucracy on this testing thing. This testing strategy. And they also use data, which has been a little bit more controversial. They've been sending out data about where the infected cases are. And I get these notices, these emergency alerts on my cell phone. And it tells me to steer clear of these places. Or if I think I may have been in the same place at the same time as an infected person, I might want to go get myself checked out.

MG: And that happens from the moment you arrive in the country. Right? You have to install some sort of app on your phone if you want to come into South Korea?

ANTHONY KUHN: Now, you do. If you're coming from the U.S. or a lot of other countries, you have to install this app, which is just a way of checking to make sure you're self quarantining, which is what you're supposed to do. But there aren't outright and at the moment the incoming the incoming cases, new cases, a lot of them are South Koreans coming back from overseas. So they're really on the lookout for new cases in the form of travellers.

MG: How do people feel about this amount of data being collected and then being used to help shape the response to this pandemic?

ANTHONY KUHN: It might not go over so well in the West, but in South Korea, there has been a poll done in February which showed that about 50 percent of the people actually want more of this data. About 40 percent think they're getting enough and less than 6 percent thought it was too much. So people want strong protection from their government there. You know, the president's ratings have shot up because of his handling of this thing. They see the international press saying that South Korea is doing a good job and according to some other polls, the Korean the Centre for Disease Control, the KCDC is now the most trusted institution in the country with more than 80cent approval ratings.

MG: How high an approval rating?

ANTHONY KUHN: More than 80 percent.

MG: Wow. Is there the sense at all, I mean if you, you know, the data is tracking you around, if you are supposed to be in quarantine and you leave that quarantine, what happens to you? Do people have a sense as to what the consequences of that would be if Big Brother, as they say, is watching?

ANTHONY KUHN: Yes, you can be punished. You can be fined or you can be arrested. But what's in a way, what's worse is the stigma when this data goes out sometimes. Although it doesn't contain names, people can be identified. And sometimes people here get blamed for for being sick and for spreading the disease. And you know, when that becomes true, then in some cases the stigma is worse than the disease itself. And one of the results of that is that people may not want to get tested and they may put even more people at risk. Another problem is that the stigma tends to hit minorities more than usual. In South Korea's case, particular church group called the Sheep Challenging Church of Jesus and which accounts for more than half of the. So they've come in to extra suspicion and also people from China. There are ethnic Koreans who have immigrated from China. There are Chinese from China and they're under extra suspicion at the moment.

MG: You mentioned just finally that today was supposed to be the day when some of those physical distancing regulations were going to be lifted, but that's not the case. How close is the end for this pandemic in South Korea, do you think?

ANTHONY KUHN: Well, clearly, you know, as I mentioned, the number of people who have been treated and released is now more than half of their total, and if they can keep these numbers down, at the very least, they don't have to worry about overwhelming their hospital, their medical system, which was the case at the epicentre at the very height of this in late February. But what they were trying to do was to have what they call a sustainable form of social visting, distancing, some way for people to get on with their lives, continue to do their jobs and factor in build in this sense sort of distancing, but they say that the most intense form of social distancing will have to continue for the next few weeks because the threat of a second wave of infections is too great.

MG: Anthony, thanks for talking to us. Appreciate it.

ANTHONY KUHN: My pleasure, Matt.

MG: Anthony Kuhn is the Seoul correspondent for National Public Radio. From the country with the highest per capita testing rates to one of the lowest, we head now to India. India is just bracing for the impact of COVID-19. The country's in the midst of a three week lockdown. Rohit Gandhi is a journalist based in New Delhi and was also a producer for the Netflix docuseries, Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak. Rohit, hello to you.

ROHIT GANDHI: Hi, Matt.

MG: What is daily life like in India right now under this lockdown?

ROHIT GANDHI: Matt, if you look at the cities of India, literally, they have been locked down. People aren't coming out very much. They're coming out just to get their basics and going back right into their homes. Most communities in urban areas are locked down. People aren't letting people enter gates and buildings are shut down. But if you look at rural India, where I am right now, people come out in the morning to do their get all the basic supplies they need and they go right back in. They open from 6 a.m. to 7:00 a.m.. Otherwise, the streets are empty. The police is everywhere, making sure that people don't travel or people just aren't running around. There is what they call the article 144, which means it's a curfew across India. People aren't supposed to come out of their homes. So it's if you look across, you can pretty much see empty roads all across this country.

MG: How do you get 1.3 billion people to stay home?

ROHIT GANDHI: It's a tall order, but you know, I think they're being so serious about it that they had to implement it. They also realised that some places they would literally have to get police on the road. Literally, you know, pushing people inside. I was in a rural community just a week ago and that every time the police would come, people would go inside their home as soon as the cops left. People are you know, these people would just come right back out and the cops would be had to come in with sticks and push people inside and say, don't come out all, we'll arrest you. So it's a very tall order. But I think the cops are being able to manage it. Not an easy task, specially in a country where there is such a large part of the population as uneducated.

MG: Well, we saw it last week, the images of hundreds of thousands of people at train and bus stations, people who had packed up everything that they had with their families, and they were walking back to their rural villages. What does that mean for the spread of COVID-19 if you have a huge migration that's underway in the midst of that lockdown?

ROHIT GANDHI: Everybody was baffled when they saw that they didn't realise it coming. They didn't see it coming, but as soon as they came, they took action. Now, whether those people did carry the a COVID virus with them, that's something that everybody still waiting to see because it was only a few days ago. A lot of people suspected that if it did done large scale testing, that they possibly would have found out. But, you know, India has some of the lowest testing rates in the world, 10 and a half tests per million. So we still don't know if those people did carry back the virus. But at the same time, you could remember for a country of 1.3 billion, there were only 4000 people who tested positive so far. So it's not a very large number. And a lot of it came either mostly from overseas and people who were coming inside the country. So people are hoping against hope that these are not the people who going to go back, that they've taken it back to their country, slide into rural India, then it's going to be mayhem in the coming few weeks.

MG: Can I go back to what you said about testing? What did you say? Ten and a half tests per million people?

ROHIT GANDHI: That's right. It is the lowest in the world because there the tests are fairly expensive. People aren't going to get it done on their own. And the contact tracing, like you mentioned, you know, you mentioned in Korea has not been, you know, well traced. They still are figuring their way around it. So it's something that, you know, everybody's worried about. Everybody is hoping that the number of 4000 is what it is, but if it isn't and you know, the number is much larger and the tests have not been done, then India has a much larger epidemic, which it might likely have. So people are hoping that it's not the case, but yeah the lowest testing rates in the world.

MG: Health care systems around the world are preparing for the surge of these cases. We're seeing that here in Canada. We're seeing it certainly in the United States and elsewhere. What capacity does the health care system in India have to deal with a surge in coronavirus cases?

ROHIT GANDHI: So India's public health system is incapable of handling it. I've seen it across the country. But what has happened right now is India's Medic Ministry of Medicine has gone and told all private hospitals they need to be open and ready whenever those cases get verified. At the same time, the military has been asked to set up a few quarantine facilities in different parts of the country. And the government has now deployed trains to create quarantine facilities for patients. So India is doing what it can. It sets a very, very large country with a very a fairly large population. And if it begins really spreading. I think India is going to be, you know, very, very difficult for India to cope. So even though India is trying to get ready, I think if it really actually comes in large numbers, it's going to be absolute chaos here.

MG: The lockdown was initially meant to last for three weeks. Is there the sense that it could go much longer than that?

ROHIT GANDHI: So one district, just outside Delhi, has already extended lockdown to 30th. There have been some announcements in the central Indian state, where I am right now, also that the lockdown will be extended. Now, there were some reports that the lockdown will be extend by 28 more days. It's based on a study which shows that if the lockdown continues for 49 days in total and people are able to maintain the social distancing, then possibly the curve will flatten and the you know, the spread rate will, you know, become much lesser. So most people are expecting that this lockdown going to last 28 more days.

MG: How, just finally, how frightened are people by what's going on?

ROHIT GANDHI: People are very frightened. Literally, I have never seen in my lifetime this country go through what it's going through right now. Literally, I wasn't expecting this kind of response when I saw it break, but honestly, I look at it and I say people are literally not interacting with other people, not even with their neighbours. They're not going over, even though they're all quarantined together in the same building, they're still not connecting with each other. So people are very, very scared. People are roaming around with masks. I seen, I was just outside 20 minutes ago and I saw a goat herder bring a goat back and he was wearing a mask. I could have never imagined that somebody like that would be able to, somebody like that would wear a mask.

MG: Rohit, take care of yourself and be safe. Thank you for talking to us.

ROHIT GANDHI: Thank you, Matt.

MG: Rohit Gandhi is a journalist and one of the producers behind the Netflix series, Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak. We reached him in New Delhi in India. Well, from a lockdown India to Stockholm, Sweden, where the streets look strangely normal despite the global pandemic. You can still meet up with friends and family for a bite in a restaurant or happy hour in the bar. The primary schools are open and the idea here is that instead of enforcing a quarantine, the Swedish government is using a different strategy against the coronavirus: trust. How's that working? Maddy Savage is in Stockholm. She's a freelance journalist covering this story for the BBC. Maddy, hello to you.

MADDY SAVAGE: Hi there.

MG: What is daily life in Sweden like today?

MADDY SAVAGE: Well, I'm looking out from my balcony over towards a pre-school, which been open all day. My local pizzeria is open. You can still go there and have a meal. They say they've actually been busier than normal because so many people have been working from home here in the suburbs on public transport, things are a lot quieter. Sweden and Stockholm in particular is a place where, thanks to flexible working policies and a very tech savvy population, the switch to working from home hasn't been as much of an effort as I think it's been in some other countries. So most people have been working from home wherever they can for about three weeks, estimated to be about 50 percent of all Stockholm. Is the pubs and bars all quieter than usual, people going out in smaller groups. Although there are cars on the road, there's traffic. It is less than doable. But certainly, as you say, when you contrast life here to those deserted streets of other European cities, London, Paris and Milan. It's a very different strategy.

MG: Can you explain the reasoning behind this strategy? Because I think it's a real head scratcher for those of us who are locked in and we're not going anywhere.

MADDY SAVAGE: The idea behind all of this is that Sweden views the coronavirus crisis as a marathon, not a sprint and it's focusing on self responsibility. So it's taking small decisions step by step at the moment, gathering the 50 people a band a week and a bit ago it was 500 that now having discussions about what might happen should they decide to close this school with how quickly could they put all of these things in place? What kind of packages do week do they need for the entrepreneurs of the businesses? So a lot of the things that have been rushed through in other countries, all of those discussions are going on in the background. Meanwhile, the focus is on trusting the public to follow the guidelines. And there are guidelines here. The key one I mentioned earlier, working from home. Don't go out if you're over 70. Don't go out if you've got symptoms. And also just general guidelines around social distancing. Those have become more and more specific in recent days. And there was very high trust here in Sweden, in the public authorities, very high approval ratings for the Swedish public health agency, which has really been sort of the front, the frontline of this as he would like, rather than the government at the high approval ratings for the government as well. This is a population that tends to do as they're told. It's a smaller population and a lot of European countries, only 10 of people here. So the hope is that we can be trusted to pull this off. But still, a lot of debates going on here as to whether Sweden can really flatten the curve enough through these measures alone.

MG: Well, and there is some talk that the prime minister might change this approach. Death rates over the weekend were rising. What's the sense as to whether this trust and the lack of an enforced quarantine or a social distancing, physical distancing is actually working? What are the numbers like?

MADDY SAVAGE: I think it's tricky to say at the moment that the press conference is held every day by the Swedish public health authorities been going on while we've been on air. And they're the top epidemiologists and those technical he has said that we're working on levelling the curve. And he thinks that that is starting to happen. And there hasn't been such a rapid uptick in cases today. 477 confirmed deaths here in Sweden. 7206 people infected. They say that's from a population of about 10 million. So those figures do sound a lot less than other European countries. But when you look at it, per 1 billion in the population of Swede is still fairly high on the list. What has been really interesting and what the experts here are saying is that you need to compare Sweden to other similar countries, which have a similar type of living. So lots of Swedes live alone. You're much more likely to live alone here than in Mediterranean countries where families tend to live together. The virus can spread also quite a sparsely populated place, Sweden. And when you compare the death rate to Denmark, which has that similar kind of lifestyle but has introduced a much harder lockdown, actually the difference is not huge. So 39 deaths for every one million people here in Sweden compared to about 30 in Denmark. Again, all of this with caution. Scientists are saying different ways that things have been measured, maybe a lag time in some cases being reported. All of this will feed into the bigger final picture when we're really able to say how much of a difference things have here compared to other Scandinavian countries.

MG: It's not some entirely remote country. I mean, there are neighbours around it who have very different policies to your point and people across Europe and beyond are treating this very differently. How are Swedes interpreting what's going on, given again, how different it is elsewhere in the world?

MADDY SAVAGE: Well, it is a debate, not just within the scientific community, but within the general public. But like I say, trust levels in the Swedish Public Health Authority and the government are all really high. People seem to be clubbing together. I think there's a certain sense of Swedish national pride in this. Can we be pragmatic? Can we be the ones that have a solution that don't wreck our economy and still provide enough health care to those in need during this time of crisis? But I mean, certainly anecdotally, you know, even within groups of groups of friends and networks of mine, there's people that have been self isolating for three weeks without any symptoms or only going out to get groceries. And then there are others that are rolling, whether or not they might go away for Easter to someone's country. Even though that's been strictly advised by the government not to do so. And having a country house isn't a particularly elite thing. Here is a lot of people have a generation, family generations or that or they've built their own. And that, I think, is going to be the key focus. Will Swedes behave overreach? Will Swedes behave as the weather gets warmer? Because it's still pretty cold here compared to a lot of other European countries. I think those will be the next key steps as we see whether the population can be trusted and also how the rates of infection continue to spread. Sorry. Go ahead.

MG: No, you're saying the rates of infection. Go ahead.

MADDY SAVAGE: Well, as I mentioned, you know, the rates are all going after the rates haven't been going up rapidly over the past 24 hours. And the top scientist here saying he thinks that the curve is starting to flatten. But I think when I talked earlier about the preparations that society is making for the next step, be that more unemployment or how do we help small businesses? They've also been doing that in terms of intensive care and hospital. So about three kilometres, a couple of miles from where I live at a conference venue that's no longer news because all big events have been cancelled. That's been transformed into a field hospital with the help of the army and that's opened today. And that's still well, there are a third of intensive care beds are still available in the Swedish capital. So there was a sense of trying to plan ahead in case things get worse alongside that trust in the public. And I think Swedes really hoping it will work, but still debates about whether or not that really will be the case.

MG: Maddy, good to speak with you. Thank you. Maddy Savage, a freelance journalist covering COVID-19 for the BBC. We reached her in Stockholm. Coming up in about 90 seconds on The Current, using wartime solutions for the present day pandemic. How Canadian businesses and manufacturers are getting creative with their skills and pivoting very quickly. You'll hear that story coming up. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current. Stay with us.

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Businesses bring wartime strategies to the COVID economy

Guests: Jeremy Hedges, John Evans, Colleen Collins

MG: Hi, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. I think it's fair to say that for most companies the COVID crisis has been a disaster. Closed shops, cancelled contracts, laid off employees. Some businesses though, are taking a wartime approach to rethink how they can contribute to this. Distilleries across the country are pumping out hand sanitizers. Clothing companies like Canada Goose and Stanfield's are making hospital smocks. And my next guest is also pivoting to medical gear. Jeremy Hedgies is the founder and CEO of InkSmith. They're normally in the business of education technology. He's on the line from Kitchener, Ontario. Jeremy, good morning.

JEREMY HEDGES: Good morning. How are you?

MG: Well, I'm okay. What are you making these days?

JEREMY HEDGES: So we pivot our business into making face shields.

MG: Face shields?

JEREMY HEDGES: So we use 3D printers, laser cutters and now stamping presses to mass manufacture them.

MG: Could you ever have imagined that this would be the world that you're in right now?

JEREMY HEDGES: Three weeks ago, I would've told you you're crazy.

MG: How do you do this? What were you making, I said you're in the business of education technology, what were you doing before?

JEREMY HEDGES: Yeah so we worked with K-12 school boards to bring tech into the classroom. 3D printers, laser cutters, robotics kits for teaching coding. We made a variety of different tools for teaching kids how to solve problems. And in a way, we put those tools to work to do just that.

MG: And how did you take those tools and suddenly start to make face shields?

JEREMY HEDGES: Well, there was an outpouring from the community about us getting involved because we have so many 3D printers and laser cutters, which basically are fabrication tools. So a lot of folks reach out to us on Twitter and eventually the KW Academy in Medicine came by our office and kind of painted a picture of just how dire the PPE shortages were. So I think it was about Friday at 11:00 that day we just started, you know, uncrating laser cutter, throwing 3D printers on tables and just rehabbing our office ad hoc to try to jump in and help. And honestly, at that point, we didn't realize the scale of the problem. We just, you know, we have the tools, so we jumped in and tried to help.

MG: OK, so explain that to me though. How do you go about making through the 3D printer, making these face shields? They're so desperately needed in hospitals across the country.

JEREMY HEDGES: Yeah so that the 3D printer, think of it like a computer controlled hot glue gun. It can draw a series of 2D pictures in plastic over and over and over again on top of each other. So it forms an object from nothing and then laser cutters are able to cut sheets of material like the plastic shield. So with those two technologies, I could make the visor and I could make the face shield. And then we had to source some things from at the time, we just ran to the store and got button hole elastic. And yeah, I mean these tools are fabrication tools. They're not the most efficient way to do it, but it was the quickest way that we could get it done.

MG: How long did it take you to figure out how to do this?

JEREMY HEDGES: Honestly. You know, not to toot our own horn here, but it was that night that we started producing in small quantities, but, you know, we did it the same day.

MG: So you had a conversation in the morning and by that night you were making these things?

JEREMY HEDGES: Yeah. And I think, you know, we were maybe making like 20 an hour at that point, but it was, we were doing our best.

MG: How many are you making now?

JEREMY HEDGES: Right now, our main location is doing about 30,000 to 40,000 a day.

MG: Wow.

JEREMY HEDGES: And that's crazy. And I'm sending in our new location and we'll make a press release about this later, but we're hoping by the end of the week we're closer to 200,000 units a day.

MG: 200000 face shields a day?

JEREMY HEDGES: Yeah. And that's what we need to do to solve this problem.

MG: You yourself seem staggered by what it is that you've accomplished in this short amount of time.

JEREMY HEDGES: I can only tell you that there's a bit of shell shock when you're looking out the window at this massive warehouse. Compared to where we were 16 days ago, this is a whole other universe. And it's an honour. We couldn't have done this without the community and all the great folks supporting us.

MG: What has it meant for for your staffing? I mean, how do you scale up to something like this and have enough people around you to be able to make a couple of hundred of these face shields? A couple hundred thousand of them every day?

JEREMY HEDGES: Well, this is the crazy thing, we've gone from 10 people to 80 people in 16 days.

MG: Wow.

JEREMY HEDGES: And we're going to need to hire another 150 to 200 just to keep up with production and get to that next phase.

MG: What would have happened to your company if you hadn't done this?

JEREMY HEDGES: Well, I think there's a little bit of serendipity here. Our education business was like really in a growth phase. We were just starting to sell internationally and we were OK. You know, we would have survived. We probably would have had to slow things down, but because we were doing well, we had the cash that we could invest in, you know, bringing this forward.

MG: You said that it's an honour to be contributing. Tell me more about how it feels to be involved in something like this.

JEREMY HEDGES: Well, you know, I kind of saw this coming for a while and and our team did. So we were all somewhat on isolation. And I can only tell you that when you're seeing these nurses and doctors pleading for help and you just see how like society around us is changing forever, it kind of feels like this is the closest thing to the frontline that we could be. You know, like we're we're doing everything we can to support those clinicians and those frontline staff. And I think that they need the community behind them. So I don't know how to describe the feeling, but it just feels like. You know, it's important to help, and that's part of the human condition and what makes us, you know, what makes us tick. So I think our team is really proud of the work that we're doing and we just hope that we can help faster.

MG: You should be proud. Congratulations. Great job.

JEREMY HEDGES: Thank you, Matt. I appreciate it.

MG: Jeremy Hedges is the founder and CEO of InkSmith. He is in Kitchener, Ontario. Across this country businesses are taking on this kind of all hands on deck approach to the pandemic and that means help can come from some pretty surprising places. My next guest has a road painting company. You know, the folks who mark the white and yellow lanes on the roads and highways? John Evans is president of Everline Coatings and Services. It's based in Calgary. John, good morning to you.

JOHN EVANS: Hey, good morning. How are you?

MG: Well, I'm well, thanks. So you go from painting lines on roads to what exactly?

JOHN EVANS: We've discovered something extraordinary. So we have actually started utilising our line painting equipment to disinfect exterior common surfaces.

MG: Okay. Explain how that works.

JOHN EVANS: Okay. So the actual, we discovered, you know, like most Canadian businesses, you know, you have an enormous level uncertainty that we're dealing with, we had a meeting basically as a team across the country as to what we were going to be, what we're gonna be doing next. And to be able to not only survive this and pivot this, but to be a part of the solution. And that's when we just you know, we discovered just piece by piece that this, that our line painting machines are actually the perfect applicators of a disinfectant, because it sprays out a pressurized, atomized spray, which is fairly, you know, low impact in the environment and that sort of thing, but it also gets the job done by killing the virus.

MG: So how do you do that? I mean, I see the trucks, you know, going down the road painting the line on the road. What are they going to be used for now? How would that equipment to help us in this situation?

JOHN EVANS: So we're actually using walk behind machines to be able to do that. So there are the Walheim machines you don't normally use in parking lots and that sort of thing. We're able to repurpose them for this for the disinfection. So you just be able to put put the actual disinfecting and that was quite the process and find the disinfectant that was one safe to use for people in the public and safe for the equipment and that sort of thing. Had to learn a lot about chemistry along the way and basically being able to put that into the machine, walk up next to a bench or a cart corral or a handrail and just being able to spread in a concentrated format.

MG: And you can do that on those sorts of things, what other surfaces would you be able to disinfect in this more efficient way?

JOHN EVANS: You got like more common areas like around hospitals, walking clinics like, you know, outside of warehouses. It can be in concrete, can be plastic, can be wood. Park benches, playgrounds, any sort of common area like that outside a shopping mall. And the reason why we more or less have started really pushing towards this is because, you know, looking to the next stage of the virus here, we're looking at the weather getting warmer and you got such a stir crazy Canadians and they're in there in their houses. They're going to want to go outside and these are going to be used and all it takes is one person to who's infected to sneeze on a bench. Somebody climbs on top of it, you know, in a nice spring day and here you go again, another outbreak.

MG: How quickly have you had to to do this pivot?

JOHN EVANS: It's so we had a meeting on a Friday, and then by the Monday, we were ready to roll and just being able to implement this.

MG: You spend all weekend, as you say, learning about disinfectants?

JOHN EVANS: It was actually a eureka moment. So we had a meeting and where it all came up was from just little ideas from everybody around the table. And then it was first thing Monday morning that they all just came together. All the pieces just came into this, like this is it, we have to go.

MG: And when would it be ready to be on the market? When will people start to be able to use this?

JOHN EVANS: Right away.

MG: Right away?

JOHN EVANS: Yeah we've been able to, it was a few days of just doing some testing, getting getting clearance by doctors, getting clearance by chemists. And now that that's done where we feel confident that we're able to start applying this.

MG: So much has changed in the last couple of weeks in all of our lives and this is the question that I asked Jeremy. Could you have ever imagined in the work that you were doing before that this is where you would end up at the beginning of April?

JOHN EVANS: No, of course not. But it's not surprising to me that people within our organization and across Canada that they are treating this like a war measures type situation. You know what? It's kind of like our superpower as as Canadians that we're able to align ourselves and to be able to up to a ship may throw the weight around in our organizations to be able to make a change here. And so not surprised by that, but a few weeks ago, yeah, this is a completely different season than we expected.

MG: You're a small business owner. Why is this important to you to be involved in this way?

JOHN EVANS: I'm a human being. First and foremost. I'm a Canadian and I'm a father, husband. All that sort of stuff. This is a defining time and my grandfather, my great grandfather, they were all involved in crisis situations, you know, in wartime and that sort of thing. And you know what, this is, it's my turn to step up and I'm glad to do so.

MG: You could imagine that there are other people who have businesses across the country who are listening, wondering what they could do. What would you say to them? Because it, to go from painting lines on the road to spraying disinfectant is a huge leap. And for a lot of people, they would find it difficult to wrap their head around it. So what would you say to those business people who are listening, thinking I want to get involved in this, but I don't know where to start?

JOHN EVANS: Everybody's is different,b but I would have to say is that, you know what, being an entrepreneur, being in that position, being a business owner, you're used to making something from nothing. You're used to problem solving. You're used to all sorts of that sort of stuff. And I would have to say that there is always something, whether it be awareness, you know, whether it be being a role model to your people to practise great social distancing and hygiene habits and all that sort of thing, to keep all that up and and even binding together with like minded companies as well as a coalition to utilise your expertise in whatever way possible for this crisis that we're dealing with.

MG: Thanks to you for doing this and I appreciate you telling us about it. John, thanks so much.

JOHN EVANS: Thank you very much.

MG: John Evans runs Everline Coatings and Services. It's a road painting company based in Calgary, which has pivoted to now spraying disinfectants on surfaces using that same equipment. It's not just Canadian businesses getting creative right now. We're also seeing innovation in education, health care, government. Colleen Collins is the interim CEO of the Canada West Foundation, former associate dean of the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University. Colleen, good morning to you.

COLLEEN COLLINS: Good morning.

MG: Are you as, not staggered, but it's impressed in some ways as I am and as I'm sure a lot of people are by how these businesses one painting lines on the road, the other involved in educational equipment are able to pivot so quickly and become something different in the midst of a crisis?

COLLEEN COLLINS: Yeah, it is a pretty, it's pretty amazing. And it is pretty, what we saw during World War 2, we saw that pivoting. Resilience is the ability to respond quickly to a problem. And, you know, a system we can't possibly have enough in stock for every emergency that's going to face us. This time it's ventilators. Next time, it could be dialysis machines. So we just can't stockpile enough of everything we're going to need. What we're gonna need is resilience. And, you know, when Jeremy talked about we have the tools to solve the problems. That's the key is we can't have you know, there's I distinguish between capacity and capability. We'll never have the capacity. We've seen these kind of field hospitals are rising. That's why we didn't have that capacity before, nor could we afford to carry that capacity permanently. We wouldn't want to have, you know, three extra hospitals in every major city sitting empty in case of a disaster. But the fact that we can build these and build them quickly, that's resilience.

MG: People talk about, well they talk about a war mentality and they talk about how this has echoes to the past and you hinted at that. I mean, where have we seen this in the past?

COLLEEN COLLINS: We you know, CD Howe was, you know, considered the minister of what was it? Bits and pieces. The genius of the response to the demand for for materials and equipment in World War 2 was exactly what we're seeing here. It wasn't a top down, yes, there was some top down. General Motors, we need you to produce tanks. But there was also this mobilization of smaller businesses. My gosh, going from, you know, 8 to 10 people to over 100 in less than a month. That kind of mobilization of small businesses to use their tools, you know, and it who would have thought an educational company would be producing PPE? Certainly not those, but they recognised that they have capacity and that capacity is their fabrication tools. So they stepped away from their organisation and they said it's not what do we produce? It's what tools do we have that we could use to produce something. So they recognised that they had capacity and that then led to that they had the capabilities that led them to be able to build the capacity. So now they're producing 200,000 masks a week, 200,000 masks a week. That's a heck of a capacity increase that we've seen because they recognize their capability.

MG: It also comes and it comes internally as well. They're the ones who decided that they wanted to do it. They weren't commanded by government to what have you. Where does government and where does regulation fit in all of this when you're trying to do things at the velocity that is required by a pandemic like this?

COLLEEN COLLINS: Yeah. So, you know, we talk about operating at the speed of business. This is a great example of how fast business can move. Government just doesn't move that fast. And that's not a comment on any particular government response. It's just they just don't they're not. That's not their DNA. Companies are especially these young start-ups. So the challenge for government is not to think of top down solutions. What the government needs to do is to when we come out of this and we're preparing again. I you know, we heard the federal government is developing a system so people can with skills can volunteer. We need to have that ready to go before the next emergency. We need to have a matching system for people who can supply, who have capacities, who can do stuff. And so it's that getting that marketplace to connect and government doesn't really need to be in the middle of that and they sure don't need to be directing it from the top down.

MG: But doesn't there need to be some sort of sense of regulation? I mean, and it's not a slight on the work that they're doing, but if you're putting, spraying disinfectant or you're making PPEs, doesn't the government or somebody need to say it's important that you're doing this and yes, we need them, but we also need to make sure that what you're creating fits the standard that's required.

COLLEEN COLLINS: Well, I think you have to you know, one of the things you have to think about is if it's technology that's being licenced, which is one of the fastest ways to get technology out there rather than inventing things that are new. Can we get that licencing to move faster? And can the approvals follow the licencing? Can we certify facilities faster? And I think, you know, what are the regulations that are standing in the way? Obviously, public safety is still very, very important. But there's there's some regulations that are more critical in this situation than others. And so I think we have to be prepared to step back and really treat large regulations. Where where is it really necessary to have, you know, inspection? And can we bring on third party inspectors quickly? Because you've got all kinds of folks now who could do inspections who aren't being utilised. And again, that's part of the whole supply chain of getting from, you know, problem to solution. Government has to be in there if there is a regulatory element and do it quickly and moving again at the speed of business. So just like the hospitals are making hard decisions and triaging how they're going to treat patients anywhere where a government regulation touches this system, they too need to triage and figure out where they need to focus on those approvals.

MG: Just in the last minute or so. You sort of hinted at this, but what do you think could stick around once this crisis is over in terms of how businesses are able to pivot and how adaptable they are?

COLLEEN COLLINS: Yeah, it's you know, it's been a master class. It's mission driven, which great innovation is. It's thinking about your capabilities, which great innovation is. All great innovators pivot. And this experience not just of companies that have had this experience, but companies that, you know, we're all reading about this and hearing about it in the morning. There's an important lesson in there of how valuable pivoting can be and how it can be done. It's not a it's not just some magic sauce that sits in Silicon Valley. The magic sources within a solar really to soar. If we can solve problems, then we can pivot. And, you know, some other lessons. We had some cash. We could do this. We had a community that supported us. All of those things are the lessons of innovation that innovators are embedded in ecosystems that help them get connected and get what they need in order to do what they need to do.

MG: Colleen, great to speak with you about this. Thank you.

COLLEEN COLLINS: Thank you.

MG: Colleen Collins is the interim CEO of the Canada West Foundation. It's a think tank. It's based in Calgary.

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How music can help during a pandemic

Guests: Karen Marley

MG: This is The Current on CBC Radio One. I'm Matt Galloway. Last week we had a story about music and healing that drew a lot of response from you. I was speaking with Adriana Barton, former Globe and Mail health reporter, who's now writing a book about the health benefits of music.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Music really does have drug like effects on us. So neuroscientists have discovered that music stimulates the same brain pathways as opioid drugs, but to a safer, milder degree. So morphine and heroin and cocaine sounds terrible, but they all act on opioid receptors in our brain. So does endorphin, which is a natural opioid that our brain produces and so does music.

MG: That's Adriana Barton. The Current's senior producer, Karen Marley is here with some of the mail we received about this. Karen, good morning.

KAREN MARLEY: Hello, Matt. Our first letter is from Madonna McInnis, writing from Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. "The one piece that comes to my mind is 'You Raise Me Up' sung by Josh Groban. The people raising me up today are the carers from the medical community, the grocery clerks and the delivery people doing everything they can to keep us all safe. And of course, the farmers everywhere making sure we still have food on the table. I'm so very grateful for all these people."

MG: Lisa Sweetman tweets from Toronto. "Tears and tender hugs in our house listening to that brief Yo-Yo Ma music. Thank you for that moment.".

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MG: Matt, this music is what Alison Rimmer from Comox, BC is suggesting.

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MG: I feel better already.

KAREN MARLEY: Indeed. This is Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and the Berlin Symphony Orchestra's performance of "Wiegenlied" by composer Richard Strauss. Alison writes, "I suggest this piece because if I close my eyes, I think this is how it feels to be a soaring bird. Just up there writing the updraughts. Nothing pressing on the agenda. Some sunshine, some clouds. Seems calm to me."

MG: Fantastic. Thank you for that, Alison. Finally, this letter comes to us from Mary Ellen Macdonald in Hope Bay, Ontario. She writes, "Our choir leader and performer from Owen Sound, "Coco Love Alcorn" had a singing a piece, "Tiny Lights," which moved me to big tears.

KAREN MARLEY: Indeed, Mary Ellen, it's a song almost perfect for our time and we'll end with that today.

MG: Karen, thank you very much.

KAREN MARLEY: Thank you.

MG: You can send an email to us. We love hearing your comments. Reach us through the website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Find us on Facebook or on Twitter. We are @TheCurrentCBC and this is Mary Ellen's suggestion. This is Coco Love Alcorn with "Tiny Lights."

[Song: "Tiny Lights" by Coco Love Alcorn]

MG: That's lovely. That's Coco Love Alcorn and "Tiny Lights." Needed that this morning. The CBC News is next. We're back in about six minutes time to talk about being a prepper for doomsday. Whether you're a Mars colonist, a bunker builder, this is a validating time if you have been preparing for the end of the world. We'll bring you some of the voices of people doing just that. It's coming up on The Current. I'm Matt Galloway. Stay with us.

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Doomsday preppers expect the worst, but not the kindness we've seen in COVID-19 pandemic, says author

Guests: Mark O’Connell

MG: Good morning, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to an extended edition of The Current.

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MG: Still to come, are you cooped up and looking for connections? There's probably a new Facebook group just for you. We'll hear about quarantine kitchens coming up in just a few moments, but first, preparing for the worst case scenario.

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VOICE: This morning, I heard a bunch of reports and saw a lot of pictures about empty stock shelves in places like Wal-Mart and Costco, where people had gone in and just bought all the cases of water they could, all the toilet paper they could. All the paper towels they could in hopes that that would save them from the virus if they had to you know hunker down for a while. What you don't see out there is people like me, people like you, who are prepared. We already have a stockpile of this stuff. We don't wait until everybody else is in panic mode to stock up.

MG: Some people may call them the ultimate cynics. Maybe not anymore though. Preppers, as they are known, spent years getting ready for different doomsday scenarios. They anticipate everything from nuclear winter to ecological collapse to, yes, a pandemic. Before the outbreak of COVID-9, the author, Mark O'Connell, travelled the world to meet preppers. His new book is called Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back. Mark O'Connell is in Dublin, Ireland. Mark, Hello.

MARK O'CONNELL: Hi Matt, how are you?

MG: I'm great, thanks. This probably seems like a smart decision in hindsight given where we are right now. But what made you decide before we entered a pandemic to get into the world of doomsday preppers?

MARK O'CONNELL: Well, it sort of grew out of, I guess, a long interlude of sort of anxiety that I was having myself around things like climate change and the parents sort of fragility of global orders that we sort of previously considered to be pretty solid and this was in like 2016, so at that point I had a three year old son and I was just sort of dealing with some, I guess some cognitive dissonance around the sort of imperatives of being a parent of an early child and having to sort of, you know, feel that you were protecting that child and create a sense of the world as a as a friendly and beautiful and good place. And also, you know, looking around and looking at the news and seeing all these sort of terrible things happening and having a sense of the future as being pretty dark. So I guess I sort of ploughed a lot of that anxiety into reading a lot about sort of doom preppers online, people who, you know, stockpile foods that, you know, have bunkers and secure locations and are really sort of obsessively preparing for the end times. So my interests kind of grew out of a personal sort of moment of of I guess crisis would be the term.

MG: That was before, what are you thinking now as you watch the world respond to where we're at?

MARK O'CONNELL: Well, I'll tell you. I mean, there's a definite sense of, I guess you would say, dramatic irony to publishing a book like this at this particular time. I mean, you know, the apocalypses is a term that is on everyone's lips, obviously. And yeah, it's a strange one. I mean, everyone wants their book to be topical, but I would personally prefer a level of topicality where say bookstores were still open and you know, mass death was not a serious prospect.

MG: How are you doing through it all? You talked about anxiety, just before we get into the other stuff, just how are you doing in the midst of all of this?

MARK O'CONNELL: Know pretty good. I mean, my life is not, you know, changed in all that radical away. I'm a writer. I can work from home. You know, my kids home from school at the moment. So that's kind of the big thing. Obviously, there's the broader context of what's happening is, is where the real anxiety resides. But, you know, in terms of my my everyday life, you know, it's strange factory publishing a book, but, you know, going again, as you say, the book has some relevance to where we are right now. So I guess it's kind of it nets out to some degree.

MG: Who are these people who are prepping for the apocalypse?

MARK O'CONNELL: Well, you know, typically very ordinary people, at least when you look at the sort of the sort of doomsday preppers who I begin the book writing about, these are people who don't I mean, a lot of them are North American. There are you know, there are certainly plenty of preppers in Europe and in the U.K. but the people I focus on tend to be North American and they have a distrust of government. So they tend to believe that government does not have people's best interests in mind and that furthermore, the government. Believes and knows that something is in the offing and is not telling people about it. So you need to sort of protect yourself and your family from whatever it may be, whether it's a global pandemic or a nuclear strike or, you know, a massive sort of hack by a terrorist organisation that's going to bring down the grid. They have a sort of an array of fears. So it's no one thing. It's not necessarily just climate change or just something else. It's a sort of a spread of anxieties.

MG: Give me give ,e a snapshot. I mean, tell us a story briefly, just one person that you encountered who would encapsulate that.

MARK O'CONNELL: So like I spent a lot of time with with the sort of prepper scene online, so I spent all the time watching like YouTube videos and leaving their forum posts and so on. And I guess maybe that's not a particularly representative character, but there was one person who was particularly taken with I got very into researching sort of the businesses that cater to the prepper community. So businesses who make things like prepared foods, you can sort of buy. You can buy and stockpile these sort of prepared. Freeze dried fruits for you know, it's actually the apocalypse. There was one guy who came I came across him on the forum who had bought a bunch of freeze-dried pasta primavera mix. And he was giving his written testimony on this website about what a great product this was because he bought it in intending to sort of lay it aside for the apocalypse. But what had happened was that his wife had gone away for the week to visit her mother in law and so he had rather than, you know, cooking for himself, he sort of cracked into his apocolypse food supply and.

MG: Not advised.

MARK O'CONNELL: No, but it's a full throated endorsement at the same time. And then, you know, there's other aspect of the book where I look at other people who are preparing for the apocalypse. And, you know, in slightly different ways, billionaires is a sort of luxury apocalypse, bunkers and sort of, you know, land in New Zealand and so on. So there's a kind of a sort of class division between the different sort of levels of prepping, I suppose.

MG: How many people are we talking about? Because again, you've heard those stories of people who, as you say, are buying luxury bunkers, which would be like their luxury apartment above ground that happens to be buried deep in the earth. And then there are the people who are packing the bug out bag getting ready to flee into the woods. How many people are we talking about here?

MARK O'CONNELL: So if we're talking about sort of that second group, that kind of, you know, more sort of Middle-Class Ordinary Preppers, that's in the millions that's I think, something about 4 million in America who identify as doomsday preppers. The other category, it's very difficult to say because it's not, you know, people who are sort of super rich or whatever don't necessarily broadcast, you know, the fact that they have these luxury bunkers or what have you. But these sort of you know, anecdotally, it's sort of Silicon Valley seems to have a have had for quite a while a kind of doomsday prepping mentality. So, you know, one of the aspects of the book is I went to to New Zealand where Peter Teil had bought a sheep station in the South Island.

MG: Early investor in Facebook, and kind of somebody who's been deeply involved in Silicon Valley for a long time.

MARK O'CONNELL: Yeah, yeah. And someone who is seen as having, you know, quite extreme right wing political views, but also quite a sort of an astute observer of global trends and someone who was seen as having a sense of, you know, an accurate forecasting of the future. So it's very difficult to say in terms of actual numbers, but one of the things that I did find when I started writing the book and when I started to talk to people about what it was doing, is that very quickly I found that, you know, I had been thinking of preppers as kind of a, you know, something that was out there and sort of external phenomenon of often quite sort of extreme right wing kind of people. And what I quickly found was that there were people in my own, you know, social world and people who I would meet just casually in Dublin or wherever I happened to be, who would say, you know, oh, yeah, I have a go get bag. I have, you know, made certain preparations or, you know, maybe you might not have done it, but might be thinking seriously about it. And of course, what we are finding now is that everyone, to some degree is thinking along these lines more or less.

MG: Was a pandemic part of their apocalypse calculations? The preppers?

MARK O'CONNELL: Yeah. So it's certainly always came up. Yeah, but as I say they have like a very broad spread of scenarios. But I mean, pandemics are things that occur, you know, pretty pretty frequently. So. Yeah, no, they did they did certainly see contagion as being a major threat and also civil unrest due to things like pandemics, which I think interestingly is something we are not seeing. And I think that's something that kind of undercuts the sort of prepper view of civilization. Preppers tend to see civilization as a very fragile sort of construct, as, you know, a thin veneer of society over a sort of an abyss of human nature, which is by its nature, savagery. And so it's a very dark view of civilization. And that's something that I think we haven't been seeing, certainly where I am. People are behaving with with real life dignity and civility and sort of care for other people for the most part.

MG: You wonder what the preppers would have thought of mean us going out at 7:30 at night and banging pots and pans to celebrate frontline workers and people kind of, you know, pitching in to make sure that people have food and that people have necessary supplies.

MARK O'CONNELL: Right. I mean, that does not fit into the prepper world view in the least. And I think the thing about preppers is that, you know, the context might be a global pandemic or it might be a nuclear attack, but the real threat, the immediate threat is people. Is society itself, the collapse of civilization and what they're really, you know, protecting themselves and their family and their property against is the breakdown of that civilization. And, you know, as we've said, that's something that we're absolutely not seeing.

MG: You could imagine that people might have laughed at those preppers before the pandemic and the economic crisis and now wondering whether they were on to something. Do you think that's fair?

MARK O'CONNELL: Yeah, I think you know, as I said, like, you know, when I was researching this book, you know, I bought a lot of preppers sort of manuals and books about prepping. And I read them in a spirit of, you know, partly in a spirit of sort of scholarship. But also, you know, I treated them in a kind of an arm's length irony. And what I did find over the last really couple of weeks is that I was taking down some of those books off the shelf again for the first time since I had written the book and sort of flicking through the index with I would say something other than scholarly interests, something other than that kind of ironic detachment. So there is an element of, you know, we told you so. And I think, you know, I can't speak for preppers, of course, not being a rapper, but I would say I would not I would not be surprised if there was a certain degree of smugness there and maybe, you know, well earned in a sense,.

MG: You're not a prepper, but are you edging closer to that, given the situation that we find ourselves in?

MARK O'CONNELL: You know, I haven't really. No. I mean, like the prospect of, you know, stockpiling foods and so on, it's come up. But, you know, I live in a small house in a city, in an inner city. So I don't have space for these things. And I'm like I don't have an instinct to retreat to the countryside or to go to a secure location, because I actually think there's a sense in which I'm diametrically opposed to preppers. For me, the secure location is the city itself. I live in a, you know, a part of Dublin that has quite a strong community. And, you know, having people around who are willing to help other people is a very important thing. And that's not something that you get from preppers. I think that their sense is that you've got to go out on your own. It's every man for himself.

MG: There's the whole idea of the bug out bag. We're not leaving anywhere to go and flee. Is there a is bugging in a phrase in the prepper world, right?

MARK O'CONNELL: Yeah. Bugging in is kind of the preferable option. So there's bugging out, which is going to a secure location. Then there's bugging in which is securing your own home. So treating your own home is a kind of fortress. And if you've ever seen any of these prepper TV shows, it was a very popular TV show on National Geographic called Doomsday Preppers some years back. And a lot of it had to do with the sort of drama of fortifying their own homes and often, you know, arming themselves to the teeth. Maybe, unsurprisingly, against all these sort of perceived threats from the outside. So that the preferred method of dealing with a crisis situation is fortifying your own home. You know, a man's home is his castle, the very kind of masculinist view of the world and a lot of ways as well. It's sort of a a reversion to that sort of masculine sort of, you know, the male as a protective figure protecting the family and the property from the outside world. So in certain ways, it's a kind of a fantasy of return to an idealized version of the past from that kind of right wing conservative point of view that you get with preppers.

MG: Just in the last minute or so, these are really grim times and the book is in many ways about people preparing for the worst. What is giving you positivity in these times?

MARK O'CONNELL: Well, actually, as I've sort of touched on already, it's other people and it's the sense that, you know, when this virus sort of really revealed its true scale and depth, you know, I guess a couple of weeks ago now, I went through a moment where, you know, I was feeling quite a bit of despair and quite a bit of grief about, you know, what was happening to the world. But I found reasons to be hopeful. And I still have those and I'm still sort of carrying those with me. And most of it has to do with like a sense of community and influence of like shared purpose. I don't know what it's like in Canada, but I'd imagine it's not dissimilar. There is a real sense that, you know, although we're separated from each other and we're sort of stuck in our own homes for the most part, there is a sense that if for the first time in my life, certainly we are engaged in. We're all experiencing the same thing. We're all going through it in different ways, going through the same problem, and there is a sense of kind of a shared purpose. And we're all acting for a kind of a sense of the common good, which is something that, you know, I think we have sort of lost a sense of of the possibility of that over the last decades, I guess. And there is something not to say that, you know, obviously the world is changing in ways that are quite disturbing and quite dark. And there's a lot of ways in which things are changing that that, you know, we would not want to see. So just in terms of hope. I think, yeah, that sense of shared common purpose is something that gives me some optimism in this obviously very dark time.

MG: Mark, it's great to talk to you.

MARK O'CONNELL: Thank you very much Matt.

MG: Take care of yourself.

MARK O'CONNELL: You too. Bye bye.

MG: Mark O'Connell's new book is called Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back. It comes out next week.

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Quarantine Kitchens

Guests: Carolyn Day, Lauren McCallum

MG: As some people prepare for the apocalypse in various ways, others adapt to a sudden pandemic.

SOUNDCLIP

CAROLYN DAY: Hi, my name is Carolyn Day. I'm a Montrealer who now lives in Los Angeles. My family and I have been in a full quarantine in our house without going to the grocery stores or any businesses for the last three weeks. We've been in self-quarantine because my sons developed a fever and a throat ache and retired for many days. Lauren McCallum and I have been friends since we were toddlers.

LAUREN MCCALLUM: I've known Carolyn Day since I was 2 years old.

CAROLYN DAY: And we've kept in touch. We are both co-founders of Quarantine Kitchen. It's a Facebook group where people share recipes from their kitchens and tricks to store foods, tricks to grow food and food sourcing and how do we all keep connected while this quarantine is happening?

LAUREN MCCALLUM: I'm Lauren McCallum. I live in Montreal. I'm also a reporter at CBC. I am in self-isolation for the most part because I'm a lung cancer survivor, so I will be working from home.

CAROLYN DAY: I think as a human, we're pre-rigged to see connections and a sense of community. I figured we all eat and to survive. So no matter what happens, we're going to seek connections through foods and Lauren came up with this great idea, right?

LAUREN MCCALLUM: Yeah. Carolyn came up with the great name, which I commend her for.

CAROLYN DAY: Lauren and I started this just over a week ago, just inviting a few of our friends and it felt like an intimate forum.

LAUREN MCCALLUM: And in a matter of no time, we managed to get a ton of members. I think we're up to about 500.

CAROLYN DAY: People that we don't know from Australia, from England.

LAUREN MCCALLUM: Some people I don't know. Some people Carolyn doesn't know.

CAROLYN DAY: I saw this morning somebody answering from Spain saying that they were in self-isolation and so far their friends had been bringing them food, but this was the last week it was happening and they did not know next week how food was going to come to their door. Creating community around food allows us to share recipes in our kitchen, but also allows us to share really important information about how coronavirus is affecting personal lives.

LAUREN MCCALLUM: And so to have this added extra little connection to the outside world and feel like you're cooking with your friends and even maybe eating with your friends adds a whole important level. I mean, I'm bored and I love to cook, so this also something fun for me to do so I can stay on track and not fall into a crazy depression or whatever.

CAROLYN DAY: I can share that I'm feeling more and more anxious in my kitchen as I see my food choices and food selections being reduced. For example, I don't have bread left in our house and the grocery store is only delivering in 10 days. So I turned to quarantine kitchens where I saw others posting about homemade bread and made my first homemade bread yesterday.

LAUREN MCCALLUM: I've also learned things. I learned what to do with chickpea water, for example. I had no idea that it can double as egg whites. All kinds of wonderful tips. As a matter of fact, I'm gonna make one of those recipes tonight that I saw on the group. It's French onion, mac and cheese.

CAROLYN DAY: These are risks that I would never have taken had it not been for Quarantine Kitchen and this community were building.

LAUREN MCCALLUM: I know for me it provides me with a sense of peace being in the kitchen, smelling all the good smells and alerts my senses and knowing that other people are doing the same thing to just makes me happier.

CAROLYN DAY: What's interesting about the way Quarantine Kitchens is set up is that each person that posts that recipe and the picture of it also answers the other members questions below it. So that site creates its own content and people answer the questions about the recipes. Remember those recipes learned that people shared that were handwritten by their grandmas?

LAUREN MCCALLUM: Yes. That's an interesting thing that Carolyn's touching on about people submitting their handwritten grandmas secret recipes. They are just so heartwarming to read. You can see how they were written out at some point in time and meant a lot to that person's family. These are recipes we always give out to our friends. Let's put it that way. And it's nice to see that coming together in these difficult times, we are sharing those things with each other.

CAROLYN DAY: Our family is self-isolating. I'm stuck with the same three people every day, day in, day out. So when separate suppertime comes around and I'm about to decide what recipe I'm going to make, I open a bottle of wine, pour myself a glass, go to Quarantine Kitchens and let the news feed inspire me.

LAUREN MCCALLUM: What people post on Quarantine Kitchens varies drastically. I mean, it could be something about look at this great dinner I made yesterday. This is something that you can easily make from your pantry without any ingredients that you need to maybe go out to the store to buy. Those are really handy. But then there's other funny posts, like when I'm looking at right now where someone says everyone's posting successful dinners and meals. But what about the ones that fail? Well, she accidentally quadrupled the butter in the cake she was making because her husband distracted her and was being silly. So she's like, now what?

CAROLYN DAY: And because a lot of members are cooking at the same time, we kind of get answers in real time and sharing in each other's reality, I think makes us all a little more human.

LAUREN MCCALLUM: The last time Carolyn and I were together was at the end of January.

CAROLYN DAY: Wow Lauren, do you realize how much the world has changed since we last saw each other?

LAUREN MCCALLUM: I had booked a flight in the fall to go visit her so we could spend some time around our birthdays because we both share birthdays a week apart. So I hopped on a flight on January 28th, again, thinking a little bit about the coronavirus, but at that point it wasn't too scary. I took my precautions, of course, and when we arrived, when I arrived in California, one of our big highlights of our trip was to pop in and go on the Price is Right. Carolyn managed to get us some tickets to do one of the recordings of the show because this show was so important to us as children. We grew up watching it together. She was a Francophone, me an Anglophone, so the show kind of helped us bond and at the same time taught us how to learn each other's languages. We didn't win. We didn't like get called down or anything, but we at least were able to get in probably one of the final tapings.

CAROLYN DAY: It's so easy in these scary times. I'm scared right now. I don't know how long my kitchen is going to have food. I'm in LA. Our mayor just announced that we should expect tens of thousands of death, if not hundreds of thousands. This is happening in my community. It creates fear. It creates fear to go to the grocery stores. It makes it that much more important that we create opportunities for each other, whether it's quarantine kitchens, whether it's whatever your passion is. You like soccer. You like flying kites. Let's we'll try to create community around what we're passionate about. And when we look back on this coronavirus episode in our history, I want us to be able to look back and say, look, we helped each other, we uplifted each other. We even though we were scared, we did our best and we kept on trying to make a better world. That's really where I'm coming from.

LAUREN MCCALLUM: Well, it's been great to talk to you. Carolyn, hang in there. Hopefully with Quarantine Kitchens we'll both be able to survive this mess and stay happy and healthy and eat really yummy comfort food at this time. I know I'm looking forward to that mac and cheese recipe. Oh I think we should probably cook that together on a video chat.

CAROLYN DAY: I happen to have three onions left. My next onion delivery is coming in next week. So let's use onions.

LAUREN MCCALLUM: That sounds fun.

CAROLYN DAY: All right. See you in Quarantine Kitchens.

LAUREN MCCALLUM: Bye.

CAROLYN DAY: Bye.

MG: Carolyn Day, Lauren McCallum, are the co-founders of Quarantine Kitchens. What are you cooking these days, whether you're in quarantine or just in physical distancing land? Let us know. You can do that through the website, cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the Contact link. We're back in about 90 seconds to talk about kids and how to talk to them through this pandemic. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current. Stay with us.

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Experts say kids may need help expressing their feelings about the pandemic

Guests: Rachel Thomas, Alice Fothergill, Robin Cox, S. Bear Bergman

MG: Hi, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Isla singing COVID-19 song].

MG: That's three-and-a-half-year-old Isla and her mother, Rachel Thomas. Isla has composed her own little song about the virus that's changing all of our lives right now. Maybe that's her way of trying to process what's actually happening. Kids and families across this country are all coming to terms with this. Adjusting to what is now being called the new normal. Lots of parents like Rachel Thomas though, are probably wondering just how much the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the little ones and whether they're feeling maybe a bit more than they're actually letting on. Rachel joins me now from her home. Rachel, good morning.

RACHEL THOMAS: Good morning.

MG: That was lovely. That little song. You have a lot going on in your house. You also have at a nine month old. Is your sence that Isla knows a lot about what's happening right now? Have you been talking to her about the situation that we find ourselves in?

RACHEL THOMAS: I tried to get ahead of it with her kind of in the early days, a week leading up to March break, just because there was some changes in routine. I kept her home from pre-school and, but she definitely knows more than I think she does. And she's always listening. And it's kind of shocking the stuff she says when I haven't explicitly talked about it with her. And we also try to avoid watching the news in front of her and sort of discussing COVID in front of her, although it's really difficult to do.

MG: When you said that you tried to get ahead of it before March break, what did you say to her about what was going to be happening?

RACHEL THOMAS: So I just said, oh, you know, there's a lot of germs going around. The first thing we did was like washing our hands, you know. So we kind of boosted our hand-washing routine and we made it like a fun thing. Like she gets to choose what song she wants to sing, Happy Birthday or ABCs and she's made up a counting song where we count to 20 to the tune of ABC. And then, you know, as things continue to change. So, you know, her dad is a teacher and so he's home now. We kind of explain that to her. And she regularly sees her grandparents and family members that we had to sort of explain, you know, why we're not going to grandma's house. And when we're outside, you know, not touching stuff, can't go to the park anymore. So we've definitely had to talk to her about things cause she realizes that things are different now.

MG: Yeah, I was going to say, what can you sense about how she is interpreting this change? I mean, even through through her behaviour and how she's acting.

RACHEL THOMAS: Luckily, I haven't seen her sort of acting out or a change in her demeanour, but, you know, I think she's at an age at three and a half where she doesn't realise the gravity of all of this. And I'm trying to kind of approach it like learning any other safety rules, like how to cross the street. We have to look for cars, hold hands, that sort of thing. So I've been trying to just treat this as this is sort of like a regular routine sort of safety thing, but we have to do from now, like, you know, from time to time.

MG: As you mentioned that you and your husband are watching the news in front of her and you're being careful about how you talk about this when she's around. What do you what are you concerned about? What are you thinking in doing that?

RACHEL THOMAS: Well, if you also we we we don't have the news on in front of her just because they're talking about death and dying. And, you know, that's not something we feel like we need to discuss with her at this point is just sort of managing our own zeidi around her like we're both very anxious about. This is a lot of unknowns that no one you know, we haven't dealt with anything like this in our lifetime. So we don't try to keep like the kind of heavy conversations to when she's in bed. But it is difficult, like we have to discuss, you know, grocery shopping or that sort of stuff. And that does come up in day-to-day conversations.

MG: What about social interactions? I mean, kids want to be around their friends and they want to have playdates and they want to go and see people. And you see somebody on the street and they want to scoot over and give them a hug or something like that. How are you managing that?

RACHEL THOMAS: She's very social. And so she definitely misses her pre-school and her friend. So we've been doing a lot of FaceTiming with family and her pre-school even does a daily circle time in the morning. Really? Do you like the letter in the day that she gets to see her friends that way. And we you know, when we're walking, if we go out for a walk, you know, if there's someone on the other side of the street, we still encourage her to say hi, because they don't want her to think, you know, other people are scary or, you know, we can't talk to other people. So definitely virtual socialization. And then luckily, she has her little sister around. So that's something else and yeah, but it's it's tricky for sure.

MG: What are you thinking about in terms of, I mean, I think all of us parents are trying to imagine what this is going to mean for our kids in the years ahead. What are you thinking about in terms of the long term effect of something like this?

RACHEL THOMAS: Yeah, I was kind of worried about that, too. I think, you know, kids are resilient. And I also love that. I think she doesn't really have a great concept of time. So, you know, hopefully this doesn't you know, as long as it goes on, she doesn't really realise the ramifications. But, you know, the one thing that's reassuring is that, you know, all of these kids are going to be in the same boat. So, you know, whatever impact this may have, it's going to be an impact on her classmates. And, you know, my husband and I are teachers. So, you know, we we know that our schools are going to have to change. You know, when they reopen sort of a comedy, these new cohort that's been through this and, you know, it'll have different challenges for sure, but I think there'll be lots of strategies and studies and support to sort of overcome this time of isolation.

MG: In the meantime, she gets and her sister are lucky enough to have you guys around for more, which is kids kind of benefit from that as well.

RACHEL THOMAS: Oh, I think she's having a ball. She gets to live in her pyjamas all day and play fun games. We made a rocket ship and everything. So I think on the whole, this is a good time for her. So I hope that she remembers it that way.

Matt Galloway: Rachel, thank you.

RACHEL THOMAS: No problem.

MG: Take care yourself.

RACHEL THOMAS: You too. Bye.

MG: Rachel Thomas is a teacher in Toronto. That idea of resilience is a really interesting one. It can be hard to predict how a child will process something. You can look to history for some guides. Go back to 2005. Hurricane Katrina smashed into the Gulf Coast, hammered the city of New Orleans. More than 1200 people were killed. Tens of thousands were displaced. You might think it's strange to compare that storm to this pandemic, but for our youngest kids, the long term effects may actually turn out to be similar. Alice Fothergill is a sociologist at the University of Vermont and the co-author of Children of Katrina. She's at home in Williston, Vermont. Alice, good morning to you.

ALICE FOTHERGILL: Good morning.

MG: We hear it all the time and Rachel said it right there, kids are resilient, little kids, especially. When you hear that, What goes through your mind?

ALICE FOTHERGILL: Well, she's right. They are resilient. And certainly in our research down in Louisiana over seven years, we heard a lot of people say, oh, they'll just bounce back. But I think one thing that we realised is, yes, they are resilient, but they need a lot of resources and a lot of support. And and I think we have to be careful of thinking that they're not affected by things. And we also found that sometimes kids would not completely reveal everything to their parents about how they were feeling. We had one boy who always comes to mind when I talk about resiliency, this boy, Daniel. And he was an amazing kid and hardworking and positive outlook and funny and talented. And but his family ended up homeless. He missed years of school. So I think it's always important to think about it in terms of what kind of support are they getting, who had the most pre-existing disadvantages, who is who is sort of able to get the support they need?

MG: Isolation is a really tricky thing. And the supports are important because the supports often will come through school. They'll be at home as well. But but there might be, you know, be greater in numbers at school because the kids are at school for a long time, whether it's day-care pre-school or later grades, if they aren't in those classrooms. Those kids can be isolated and that can change, you know, how they interact with other people. What have you learned about how kids would experience isolation depending on where they happen to live? Maybe they live in a big city, maybe they live in a more rural area.

ALICE FOTHERGILL: Yeah, I think that's the isolation is really, really important. And we did actually see quite a bit of that as children were evacuated from New Orleans and displaced for a long time. And yes, and as you said, it's really different from the pandemic, but there's actually a lot of similarities. We found a lot of children were isolated from other members of their family and cut off from them. And that actually had an enormous impact on kids there. They didn't see maybe their grandmothers or older siblings. They also were there a lot of households that evacuated and in this case, the pandemic who might be staying at home, not with one of their parents if their parents are not together. So that isolation is big. And you're right, school is is that structure where kids are interacting with so many people. And I think school is actually really important to be thinking about right now. So what what are the kids missing? So it's the academics, it's the routines, it's the structure. It's that social piece too. They we found that a lot of research had we hadn't really seen enough about how much peers and friends, how critical they were to kids. They need to know that they're that their friends are okay. And where are they and are they all right? They needed communication. But I think actually the one thing that maybe is my biggest concern about isolation is that children get a lot of support from other adults and that that might be an adult who's maybe at their church or a coach. But also teachers or other people in the school building. And just the way in which kids need other adults aside from their own guardians, and they are become, you know, that really important people in these kids' lives. One little boy in our study, It was the custodian of his school that became sort of his key person who sort of kept an eye on him when things were not going well in the aftermath of the storm. But the one of the concerns now is thinking about this idea that not everyone is having very similar experiences, depending on the stability of their homes and the that the other adults are actually really good at making sure those kids are OK. Keeping an eye on them. So I think that's one of my greatest concerns that we got from our study, is that we need those other adults keeping an eye on those kids and making sure that they're OK.

MG: In the last minute or so that we have, tell us the story of of Sierra because in some ways Sierra illustrates what she went through, illustrates kind of some of the challenges that kids might be facing as they go through this.

ALICE FOTHERGILL: Yeah. So Sierra was evacuated with her mother to one of the hospitals in New Orleans, and they were trapped there during the storm. And it was just a terribly frightening experiencing and life-threatening experience. So she experienced the intensity of the storm. But when they evacuated and got out of there, her phantom, she was just Sierra and her mother. But one of the things was that she was able to find what we call finding equilibrium because she got resources and social support. She had a teacher at her new school who said, oh, I can tell that she's suffering from some depression. I really I'm going to see what I can do for her. Her mother was very on top of it and realise that Sierra was not doing OK with what had happened and reached out to get resources. And then there were also, you know, structural supports. They were able to them. Her mother was able to get a job.They were able to get housing these very concrete things. They were able to help her connect with her old friends. And actually, she's she's really you know, she's an exception to the rule. In general, what we found is the kids that had the greatest resource depth were the ones who did the best with their recovery trajectory. But Sierra was an exception to that rule. And I just got mentioned one thing, because one of the things that Sierra did is she illustrated capacities that kids actually can do a lot themselves. They help other adults, they help other children, maybe playing, doing homework, but she also did things for herself and she started writing poetry. The little girl on your show who sang a song, that's a great example of a capacity of a child to be able to help themselves.

MG: Alice, thank you.

ALICE FOTHERGILL: Thank you.

MG: Alice Fothergill is a sociologist and the co-author of The Children of Katrina. She was in Williston, Vermont. Katrina happened 15 years ago. This pandemic is unfolding right now, obviously, which means that our kids are in the thick of it. Robin Cox spends a lot of time thinking about what that means for their mental health. She teaches disaster and emergency management at Royal Roads University and is the head of the Resilience by Design Research Innovation Lab. Robin, good morning to you.

ROBIN COX: Good morning.

MG: How are kids absorbing from your perspective, what's happening right now?

ROBIN COX: Well, it greatly depends on the age of the child, of course. But kids are aware whether they're three or 13. And so part of what's important for parents is to understand how much their children know and and to have those conversations with them so that they can also address misinformation, which we know is always an issue.

MG: What does that stress and anxiety look like in really young children? If your kids are under, the age of 7, how would you know whether they are feeling that sense of anxiety that we're all feeling right now?

ROBIN COX: Well, we know from the disaster research and I, in the lab have done work following floods and wildfires and hurricanes cetera. We know that for young children can sort of revert to earlier behaviours and become more clingy. They may revert to like a young child who has not been wetting their bed, might revert to or have bedwetting episodes. 5 and up may become more irritable, cranky, not wanting to do things. So the signs of stress in children are in some ways not that dissimilar. The facts of them are dissimilar, but they're not that dissimilar to us. People get less emotional bandwidth and they want more sense of safety and security. And kids, although they won't ask for routines, really benefit from the routines and the safety that that provides.

MG: Can you give us the one thing that would be easy to help ease that anxiety and the stress, especially if the kids are too young to fully say what it is that they're going through?

ROBIN COX: Yeah. So one of the most important things that parents can do is try to remain calm themselves. Kids pick up on the emotional state of their parents or their caregivers. So trying to remain calm and reassuring regardless of the age being available to talk. Now, a child who's pre-verbal that might just be holding them and spending time with them with a young child that you had on earlier. Being able to talk to children in age appropriate ways, to listen to their questions, ask them if they have any questions. We often use art and various other creative means to work with young children because it gives them a way of expressing themselves, processing their emotions and not having to rely on the words that they may or may not have access to.

MG: Does it help us as well as parents and caregivers?

ROBIN COX: Absolutely. I mean, art is not the only thing to do, but art is a wonderful activity in that one, it is an activity. So your body's engaged, your mind's engaged. So that can be a distraction and just something to occupy your time. It allows for a way to express things that you may not have access to either because you don't have the words or you yourself don't know what's going on. If you're five or fifty five, you may not be able to articulate what's going on, but you're feeling anxious, restless, etc. So it gives an outlet for that. And for parents and for adults, for that matter, but for parents of children, it also gives an externalized object that can spark a conversation and support it. So you can talk to a child about what that picture is and why the monster, the Corona monster is scary and what's scary about that? So it provides a way of having those conversations with children where just sitting with them and asking them doesn't work. It's not a lot different in that way from something. You know, if you might want to talk to children about, you know, sex education and they're not interested in talking to you about it. But this is a way of engaging in a conversation that can feel safe. It can feel active. It can also be a way of working with children so that they have a sense that they are helping. We know resilience is very much tied to a sense of self agency, the ability to have some control and be able to do something so kids can send messages to grandparents or other friends that they're not seeing. They can participate in the on the balcony noise making or or putting, you know, images up in the window that are messages of support to health care providers and neighbours. These are these are lovely creative ways that help children both process, but also stay active and feel like they are doing something to contribute.

MG: Just finally, do you worry about the long term effects of this? I think a lot of parents worry if this goes on and on how kids will be impacted by this down the road. Do you worry about that?

ROBIN COX: Well, yes and you know, as as your previous caller suggested, there is a great deal of resilience in humans generally and in children, which is not to say that we need to ignore it and imagine that all children are going to get through this unscathed. But there is a great deal of resilience. And I think in the long term, when children are back in school, we know that schools for the most part are very aware of. And we'll work very closely with children recognising that this is present, you know, creating activities that may be around history or language or maths, but that can tie into this tool again, allow children to be able to express the support networks that they will have will also have been through this experience. So they will have peers to talk to when we know that those peer to peer conversations are really critical for children and for adults. We also know that there will be resources. We're very lucky in Canada that there will be resources that are specifically linked to supporting children and families recover and get back to normal routines. Everyone's going to be affected by this. There's no one that's going to be untouched by it. And we see that with any disaster and this just happens to be true of the entire nation. So the the one thing that is there that we know is there is that there will be others who are going through the same thing. And can we can support each other and children can support each other as well.

MG: Robin, it's great to talk to you. Thank you.

ROBIN COX: Thank you so much and be safe.

MG: And you. Robin Cox is a professor with the Disaster and Emergency Management Graduate Program at Royal Roads University in Victoria. As we've been hearing, coping at home is difficult for parents and kids. Everyone has different ways of settling down and dealing with the stress that so many of us are feeling. Sometimes the basic solutions are the best ones. Things like good old fashioned story time.

SOUNDCLIP

[S. Bear Bergman reading children's book]

MG: The Canadian children's book author asked S. Bear Bergman and one of his kids. Bear is the founder of Flamingo Rampant. It's a publisher known for its LGBTQ+ books. Also one of the many authors reading to kids online right now. Bear, good morning.

S. BEAR BERGMAN: Good morning.

MG: A bit of a juggling act there, but you got the reading done after the fossils were put away.

S. BEAR BERGMAN: Yes.

MG: You're doing this daily storytime on Facebook. Tell me why you wanted to do this.

S. BEAR BERGMAN: I mean, I work from home much of the time. I'm a writer. I have a small publishing company. I do some consulting. Sometimes I have children at home for various reasons. And it's very difficult. And when it was announced that schools were closing and many parents were going to have to stay home. My immediate thought was, oh, God. People are going to need some help with that. And, you know, there's a lot of things I can't do. But one thing I can do is read stories. Know, we have a small publishing company, Flamingo rampant. So we have 22 titles of our own, plus a very large collection of children's books in the house. And I just thought, OK, you know what? Every morning at 10:30, we'll sit down and we'll read some stories and we'll do a little art project. Now, occasionally we sing some songs, but just so that parents could have a solid half hour of safe and engaging content that they could put their kids in front of and then have a phone call or go to the bathroom by themselves or literally anything.

MG: Parents, thank you for that, by the way, because I think they're all wanting that break. What are kids looking for right now? What kind of stories do kids like best in this moment?

S. BEAR BERGMAN: I mean, it's hard for me to know that for sure. I generally assume that kids like stories where children are the primary action takers, where there are mysteries or problems to solve or adventures to go on. Kids like books that show other children being, you know, well, as happy and loved. So we're just kind of going with that.

MG: One of the things about reading aloud to kids is that you can have that connection through the story. But also a lot of it is being face to face. And whether it's the gestures that you make, the look on your face or looking into the kid's eyes. How much of a connection do you think the kids have with these stories through a screen as opposed to a person?

S. BEAR BERGMAN: I mean, I think it's probably less than if we were all together in the same tree, which of course, is preferable, but it's more than if they're parked in front of another episode of patrol. So. You know, we try to connect as best we can. I definitely reflect on things that come up in what I'm reading. We do something called the drawing of the day. We have a themed drawing every day where we encourage kids to to draw something on a theme. Friday it was teams. Monday, it was dragons. You know, whatever we can think of. And then the next day we showed the kids are on the show and say their names. That seems to be very popular. I think it helps the kids feel a little bit more like they're able to participate in something larger than their own household.

MG: How are your kids coping with all of this?

S. BEAR BERGMAN: They are up and down. I think like everyone. Sometimes they're very enthusiastic about, hey, let's make our show or let's do a complicated baking project or, you know, I have invented a variety of nonsense games to keep them moving in our very small amount of space. So, you know, right now they're very excited about chocolate chip relay.

MG: is it just as it sounds, a relay involving chocolate chips?

S. BEAR BERGMAN: Pretty much. I pour out a little pile of chocolate chips and then I give them tasks like due to lapse, like a chicken flapping your arms and clucking to three laps, like a bunny rabbit hopping on both feet. And then every time they complete a level, they get two chocolate chips and then they get their next level assignment.

MG: And how are you doing in the midst of all of this?

S. BEAR BERGMAN: You know, I'm very grateful to be able to be home and to be with them and to have something useful that I can do. And also, it's hard. We're all together every minute of every day and, you know, we live in a small downtown co-op space. I am currently, you know, shut in the only room in the house where you can mostly not hear any other people surrounded by unfolded clean laundry and lego.

MG: This is the new reality that we all have to face. A lot of parents will thank you for the work that you're doing and I appreciate you telling us about it. Bear, thanks.

S. BEAR BERGMAN: Thanks for having me.

MG: S. Bear Bergman is a Toronto author. You can check out his storytime for kids, runs it every day. Look for the Flamingo Rampant Facebook page. Flamingo Rampant. The CBC News is next. We're back in six minutes with the story of a man who's seven years into travelling around the world by foot. The pandemic is presenting a bit of a roadblock. You'll hear that coming up. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current.

[Music]

10

As COVID-19 puts his journey on hold, globe-trotting writer worries pandemic will hit developing world hard

Guests: Paul Salopek

MG: Good morning, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to an extended edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

MG: Still to come, keep your eyes on the sky. You might just see Martha Wainwright doing a balcony singalong. Her conversation with Tom Power is coming up. But first, he's travelling by foot, bearing witness along the way.

[Music: Theme]

MG: When he set out on his journey, Paul Salopek figured it would take him about seven years. Now he's delayed, holed up in Myanmar. You might remember Paul. The Current checks in with him every year. Paul is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, National Geographic Fellow. He's walking the route our ancestors first travelled out of Africa. And it's an experiment in slow journalism, which we could all use these days as things move at two thousand feet per second. Paul's on the line with us now. Paul. Hello.

PAUL SALOPEK: Hi Matt. So good to hear you.

MG: Great to have you on the program. Where are you?

PAUL SALOPEK: I'm paused on the walk in northern Myanmar.

MG: Tell me about the pause and how your journey has been affected by this global pandemic.

PAUL SALOPEK: Yeah, well, you know, I had just finished walking across northern India for a year and a half of almost 5000 kilometres. And the plan here was to take a break to work on a book in any case, and then the pandemic erupted. So I'm basically in kind of self-isolation anyway. Writer self-isolation and hello.

MG: Are you there?

PAUL SALOPEK: Yep. I am.

MG: Continue. Hello, Paul.

PAUL SALOPEK: Yes.

MG: Sorry. The line's breaking up a little bit, which I can understand. You're in a remote part of Myanmar. Tell us a bit about what the situation is like there on the streets in the town that you're in.

PAUL SALOPEK: Yeah, well, you know, I was in Mandalay, the second largest city in Myanmar. And they're basically just undergoing the beginnings of the lockdown now. Southeast Asia has not been a hotspot, as you know, in this pandemic yet, but they are taking precautions now. And I think the issue here is nobody really knows how badly it's going to hit because they don't have the testing capacity of, say, the richer corners of the world.

MG: And so where are you staying in the middle of that?

PAUL SALOPEK: So I was in Mandalay until a few days ago, and now I've moved to a small community up in the far north of Myanmar near the Tibet border, actually it's at the foothills of the Himalayas. So here the impact is minimal. I mean, people are in the streets, farmers are out in their fields. Again. Southeast Asia has until very, very recently kind of been spared the worst of this pandemic. I fear for it, though, the way I fear for much of the developing world, because I think that this pandemic spread along lines of affluence that went where, you know, the richest globalised countries are located and they got infected early because of air travel. But once it ripples down to the less privileged corners of the world, where there are very weak health health systems and you know, there's a very low doctor, too, to population ratio, there's not much of a social safety net. It's going to be pretty, pretty difficult.

MG: And so, as you say, your walk is on pause. How long do you think you're going to have to to sit tight?

PAUL SALOPEK: Well, you know, I was originally planning to restart the walk in the late summer, but I don't have to contend with with airline lockdowns, right. That's one one blessing of walking around the world. I don't have to step into airports, but when land borders close, that traps me like everybody else. So I'm just waiting to see. Hopefully things will ease up later in the summer and I'll be able to walk on through Thailand, Laos and hopefully into China even.

MG: Has this made you rethink at all your journey? Have you had to think about getting out and trying to find safety somewhere else?

PAUL SALOPEK: You know the project is a bit unusual in that one of the ideas, the core ideas, is not to leave the walking trail. So I've not been back to the U.S. in seven years and the plan is to stick with it, to kind of get into the Stone Age frame of mind of the ancestors who I'm following across the world. And so far, I haven't felt the need to kind of jump on a plane and go back. I'm going to ride out the pandemic as long as I can here at the trail head in Southeast Asia and basically document the lives of the people around me how they are going to handle this global disaster. Again, you know, it's again, it's remarkably calm here, but the poor corners of the world, I think, are really going to be hit hard. So it might be a pretty big calamity headed this way.

MG: What are you noticing from your perspective, which is such a unique vantage point? What are you noticing about how different parts of the world are dealing with a crisis like this?

PAUL SALOPEK: That's a really interesting point. You know, for the past seven years, I've been walking through, you know, through Africa, through the Middle East, through the Caucasuses, through Central Asia, into South Asia, into India and now in Myanmar. Often in societies that don't have lots of resources, right, these are, you know, rural societies. I'd say more than half of the human landscapes that have walked through over the past seven years have been countryside — farmland, not cities — and areas where people have learned to get by and make do on very little. And they're contending with very difficult times already: Climate change, crop alterations, areas of insecurity, you know, walk through a few war zones. And so this for the people that I've walked through, the people who've been my partners, my community, if you will, on foot across this line of travel, this is just another difficulty to deal with. In a certain way, I think they're, in some ways, even more prepared for it than people who are in the global north, people in Canada, the United States or Europe, who haven't had to contend with this kind of massive disruption at least in three generations or so, going back to World War II.

MG: What do you make and I'm not sure whether you're seeing a lot of them, but here, as you say, in the global north and on this side of the world, there are images of people trying panic buying toilet paper, for example, buying up shelves full of of chickpeas and pasta sauce. What do you make of that, given what you just said?

PAUL SALOPEK: Well, think about this, for much of the world, people don't have the cash on hand to go panic buying. Right? You can't go to the shop and pick up emergency supplies of basic foodstuffs because you're living week to week and in extreme cases, day to day. Right? A lot of people are living on two or three dollars a day in the world. So that is going to be the biggest difference. It's this paradox. I think psychically, the people who are my friends, the people around me, the Burmese, the farmers who've had kind of tough lives and are used to living with uncertainty. Psychologically, they're better prepared, but physically, they're not going to be prepared at all because they don't have the economic buffer say that that my family and friends back in North America do. They can't go sell sequester at home. They can't quarantine at home because they they don't have a bank account. The governments don't give them a relief cheque. You know, if you don't work, if you're not out on the streets selling rice noodles, you yourself don't eat.

MG: What have you learned about how resilient we can be as humans?

PAUL SALOPEK: I'm sorry. Could you repeat?

MG: What have you learned about how resilient we can be as humans in the work, in the walking that you've done and then in what you've seen?

PAUL SALOPEK: I think one of the great lessons of the out of even walk is this daily affirmation of just how much we're a problem solving species. I mean, it goes back to the original people that I followed who left Africa 100,000 to 60,000 years ago and they invented their way across the planet and delivered it to us. They're the people who gave us the world that made us a global species by adapting to all these new and different environments. And you know what? We still have those muscles. I mean, people are incredibly creative. And in the most difficult of times, even before this project, I did a lot of war reporting and people in wars. You know, we get through like extreme situations, people and extremists. We get we get TV news of bang, bang and explosions. But if you just pivot the camera, there'll be an old lady selling something on the street corner not too far away in the middle of that mayhem. We love, we learn, we survive even in the middle of extreme situations. And so I think absolutely we'll get through this. And, you know, my hope is that we'll get through it, as difficult and tragic as it's going to be it — and that it certainly will be — we may learn a few things through these hard times, right, and actually learn to value again what's important. So there might be some positive things that come out of this pandemic.

MG: We have been forced to relinquish control in some ways of our lives by this pandemic. And all of this is happening so quickly. Things are happening now that would have been unimaginable last week or two weeks ago. Your whole journey is about, I said, slow journalism, about moving slowly and about being very gradual. What could we learn from slowing down, do you think?

PAUL SALOPEK: I think, you know, that's what I'm trying to get at in terms of what there might be kind of a paradigm shift, at least if you if you're awake to it, that if you get off the, you know, the merry go round that many of us live on in and look at your life more closely and and you get to then understand it. There's certain things that you thought were important. They may not be that important. And there's certain things missing that you didn't even have a name for. And that's what slowing down does for me and my storytelling. You know, people ask me, do you get bored? I mean, you're walking from horizon to horizon day after day, week after week, month to month. I'm saying, are you crazy? It's the opposite of being bored. When you slow down enough to actually breathe in the air and look around you at closely and observe the environment around you closely and to have slow interactions with people, leisurely conversations. There's a richness and depth in that. It's like a rediscovery of human community. And that's what my storytelling is rooted in. That's what my journey is rooted in. And I think that's what walking has given me. And I think in a strange way, this pandemic has forced us to kind of do that. It's forced us to kind of turn inward, but not only inward, but also outward to the important things, which again, is the people around you. Right? I think that's going to be a really powerful rediscovery from this whole terrible experience is how important we are to each other.

MG: Paul, take care of yourself and be well and be safe. And I appreciate you speaking to us.

PAUL SALOPEK: It's always a pleasure, Matt. Thank you for checking in on the trail, as always.

MG: Paul Salopek is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and fellow with National Geographic. He's the principal pilgrim of the Out of Eden Walk. And we reached him in rural Myanmar.

[Music]

11

Tom Power in conversation with Martha Wainwright and Rhiannon Giddens

Guests: Tom Power, Martha Wainwright, Rhiannon Giddens