Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week mask ...




Speaking of masks:

Canada’s public health experts are now fully recommending Canadians wear non-medical face masks in public when they aren’t sure they will be able to keep their distance from others.

Dr. Theresa Tam said the new recommendation comes as stay-at-home orders are lifting in different provinces and more people are going outside, riding public transit, or visiting stores.

“This will help us reopen and add another layer to how you go out safely,” Tam said Wednesday in her daily briefing to Canadians on the COVID-19 pandemic.

 
To wit:

March 30: Dr. Tam on face masks: “We want to protect our frontline healthcare workers and prioritizing supply is critically important and we’re looking at all sorts of avenues to procure. For the public, I think the current scientific evidence we are continuing to evaluation. Of course we can be flexible if we find any new evidence.  But I think the scientific evidence is that if you are sick then put on a mask to prevent those droplets from flying in any space as you’re perhaps going to a clinic or having to move around the community for essential needs. Putting a mask on an asymptomatic person is not beneficial obviously if you’re not affected. If you have close contact of a case, under certain circumstances, you’ll also be in self-isolation by the way if you’re in close contact of a case, and you need to move for any essential reasons that’s perhaps another situation. What we worry about is actually the potential negative aspects of wearing masks, where people are not protecting their eyes or other aspects of where the virus could enter your body and that gives you a false sense of confidence. But also it increases the touching of your face. If you think about if, if you got a mask around face a mask around your face, sometimes you can’t help it because you are just touching parts of your face. The other thing is that the outside of the mask could be contaminated as well. The key is hand-washing, absolutely, for sure.”

(Sidebar: why is it that surgeons put on masks and then never touch them? Hhhmmm ...)

**

Dr. Theresa Tam, chief public health officer of Canada, said the supply of medical-grade masks must be preserved for health system workers and those looking after patients infected with COVID-19.

"The effectiveness of the use of non-medical masks hasn't really been well demonstrated," said Tam. "But I think that there may not be any harm in wearing it, if one uses it properly — it's not gaping, it's really well fitted and you practice hygienic measures."

(Sidebar: yes, about that ...)

Until recently, the federal government was saying that masks are unnecessary for those not exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms and that non-medical masks, or poorly-fitted medical masks, won't filter out the small airborne particles carrying the virus.

 
What makes this silly cow think that she has any credibility left?

Why bother admitting your mistakes now or at all? That $2,000 worth of beer money is enough of a bribe.


Also - why? Because Canada behaves like a Third World country. That's why:

If you come down with COVID-19 symptoms, Ontario’s Ministry of Health recommends you do an online self-assessment. If you’re deemed high-risk, you’ll also be asked to contact your doctor. Or you’ll be directed to Telehealth Ontario, where a nurse will discuss your symptoms with you over the phone and decide whether you should be tested at one of the province’s 129 assessment centres.
The only problem is you’ll have to wait for that consult. The site warns that “Telehealth Ontario is experiencing heavy call volumes and will get to your call as quickly as they can.”

“In four hours, someone will call you back,” Hayley Chazan, spokesperson for Ontario Health Minister Christine Eliiott, said last week. That wait time was up to 24 hours just weeks ago.

The other option is to bypass the self-assessment tool and contact your doctor and have them call you back via a telehealth consult. Or you could contact your local health unit. That’s because technically you can’t go to an assessment centre if you’re not referred by a physician. A doctor can refer you to one of the 129 assessment centres in the province, provided they’re familiar with the referral process.

If you’re elderly, have no access to a computer, don’t speak English or can’t figure out how to call your physician, this can all be rather problematic.

But if you just show up at a testing centre and ask for a test, you will be turned away, says Chazan, as the ministry doesn’t recommend Ontarians visit them without being referred. She concedes some centres may let you in. “It’s up to the discretion of the assessment centres — they might differ,” she says.

And:

If Canada is determined not to make the same mistakes again, the hard part won’t be coming up with recommendations, it will be summoning the political will to plunge resources into fixing the problems.

In fact, many of the most important recommendations were already made in a report commissioned after the 2003 SARS epidemic. Medical experts mention it with a sense of frustration, but also hope the current crisis will inject much-needed urgency into the situation.

Not bloody likely.




The Liberals are accountable only to their Chinese financiers:

We know so little of what is being decided, the protocols under which massive expenditures are being decided on, why X group receives money and Y group does not, why $9 billion for students and $2.5 billion for seniors. There should be questions and answers for every amount.

All we really do know is that the deficit is inflating at a prodigious rate and that the resources for keeping track of it all are thin to woeful.

One headline from the National Post tells of the auditor general lamenting that his office simply does not have the resources to execute its essential duties. Let me cite it: “House committee unanimous in petitioning Morneau to cover auditor general’s funding shortfall.” In the jargon of the noble trade, the “sub-head” gives the alarming information that he told the committee in May that his office had “no choice” but to cut five planned audits for the current year. This is worrisome stuff. The one parliamentary office set to watch over the public treasury is being forced to amputate the office’s oversight. There is a further lament: “Government expenditures are increasing, which amplifies the challenges we are facing.” I’ll say.

**

Francois-Phillipe Champagne actually refused to let the word “Taiwan” cross his lips despite being asked several times. He’s also refused to upbraid China’s ambassador to Canada for denouncing the actions of a Commons committee looking into COVID-19.

There was a time that Trudeau’s health minister told a reporter he was pushing conspiracy theories by asking about reports focusing on when China became aware of the coronavirus. The question was based on articles from The Associated Press, citing Chinese government documents, that showed Beijing officials knew they were facing a pandemic on Jan. 14 but waited until Jan. 20 to tell the public. ...

On Monday, as the World Health Organization held its big meeting in Geneva, International Cooperation Minister Karina Gould was defending the government’s position on CBC. The minister was asked if the WHO should have been more skeptical of China’s claims and data given their pattern of lying in the face of embarrassing situations — like SARS and now COVID.

**

“Today @GovCanHealth shockingly approved 1st Cdn human clinical trial for potential #SARSCoV2 vaccine at Halifax’s Cdn Centre for Vaccinology in partnership w/communist China’s military. #CdnMedia left out that last critical CCP detail from all of its #COVID19Canada coverage today”

(Sidebar: Indeed -  “The normal vaccine development cycle is 10 to 15 years,” said Gill. “The shortest vaccine development cycle on record is for the mumps vaccine at four years. This human clinical trial with China’s Communist Party’s vaccine is proceeding at an alarmingly dangerous rate without adherence to research ethics and transparency.”
Gill added that it is also alarming that Health Canada may use the vaccine before the study ends in an “emergency release.” There are already some discussions happening about what those steps will entail.
“Even the United States’ Center for Disease Control and Prevention warned last week that ‘there is the possibility of negative consequences where certain vaccines could actually enhance the negative effects of the infection,” said Gill. “And the biggest unknown is efficacy […] We must not lose sight of the fact that coronaviruses are a large family of RNA viruses, which include the common cold. No approved human coronavirus vaccines exist.”)


**

• 1997 – The RCMP and CSIS published a joint report called Project Sidewinder, which examined the relationships between powerful players in China and Canada. Project Sidewinder recommended further investigations into Chinese influence in Canada, but the report was dismissed by the PMO under Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien.

• 1998 – Project Sidewinder was reviewed and ultimately dismissed again by the Security Intelligence Review Committee, which at the time was led by MP Bob Rae. Rae would go on to become an interim Liberal leader.

• John Rae, brother of former Liberal leader Bob Rae and former Liberal campaign co–chair, is a senior manager of Power Corp. Power Corp has significant investments in China, including assets bought from the China International Trust Investment Corporation (CITIC), an investment firm owned by the Chinese government.

• André Desmarais, the deputy chair, president, and co–CEO of Power Corp was once appointed as a director of CITIC. Desmarais is the son–in–law of Jean Chrétien.

• Chrétien himself sat on the board of a Power Corp subsidiary before his election as Liberal leader.

Do read the whole thing. 




 
Who will preside over an inquiry? Elizabeth Wettlauffer?:

Families of residents at a Pickering long-term care home that has been hard-hit by a coronavirus outbreak are requesting a criminal investigation into the handling of the virus at the facility amid allegations of neglect.

Seventy residents at Orchard Villa who were infected with COVID-19 have died and it marks the highest publicly confirmed death toll at an Ontario long-term care home, according to data from the ministry of long term care.

It's just money:

Canada’s consumer debt levels are set to soar as homeowners struggle to pay down pricey mortgages, adding to debt strains that were troublesome even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the country’s national housing agency says.

In testimony before the House of Commons Finance committee on Tuesday, Evan Siddall, president and CEO of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), said the country could see claims from defaulted mortgages reach $9 billion as a result of the coronavirus. As many as 20 per cent of mortgages could go into arrears if the economic situation in Canada does not improve, Siddall said.

His comments, which Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre called “bloody terrifying,” add new urgency to the exceptionally high levels of household debt in Canada, about two thirds of which is tied up in mortgages. Various organizations including the International Monetary Fund have warned Canada about its unsustainable consumer debt levels, which now threaten to spill over into the economy as it enters its third month of lockdown.

**

Statistics Canada’s labour-force survey for last month, completed April 18, points to three million people having lost their jobs and another 2.5 million working less than half their normal hours since the pandemic started — 5.5 million in total.

But by April 19, the government had received CERB claims from 6.7 million people, a difference of more than a million people.

Economists are divided about what that means. Some suggest it’s simply a statistical anomaly, the employment numbers not lining up chronologically with CERB stats.

The terrorists who took down Air India 182 were never punished. Why expect that anything will change?:

While counter-terrorism agencies have disrupted international mass-casualty plots by the Toronto 18 and Via Rail conspirators, the unsophisticated loners have gone unnoticed until it was too late.

Terrorist groups like ISIS are well aware that lone attackers using simple weapons are more difficult to detect, which is why their propaganda has encouraged supporters to kill with knives, vehicles and even rocks.

“It’s nearly impossible to stop these opportunistic attacks, particularly from lone wolves that don’t have a digital footprint per se, or aren’t part of a larger organization,” said Colin Clarke, a senior research fellow at the Soufan Centre.

“It’s very hard.”

Bullsh--.

If you can track down a naughty tweet, you can track down an anti-semite hiding in a mosque.


Also - facts like these make blanket bans on guns seem very questionable:

Police in Nova Scotia knew that a gunman carrying out a murderous rampage was traveling in a fake police car 12 hours before they warned the public, according to a recently unsealed warrant.

New details of Canada’s worst mass shooting were revealed on Tuesday after media outlets successfully petitioned for the unsealing of warrants used during the hunt for the man to search two properties he owned.

Gabriel Wortman murdered 22 people on 18 and 19 April, before he was eventually shot dead by police outside a gas station.

The latest revelations will add pressure to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who have come under scrutiny for their response to the shooting and reports that neighbours had warned police that Wortman posed a threat before the murders.

I don't think it will get that far, Jason. Joe Biden can't remember where he is half of the time:

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney says he would consider filing a complaint under international trade law if Joe Biden wins the U.S. election and rips up the Keystone XL pipeline permits.

It isn't only a matter of dishonesty. It's a matter of tracing the exact nature of illness and death and for whom and why:

Public health officials in some states are accused of bungling coronavirus infection statistics or even using a little sleight of hand to deliberately make things look better than they are. 

The risk is that politicians, business owners and ordinary Americans who are making decisions about lockdowns, reopenings and other day-to-day matters could be left with the impression that the virus is under more control than it actually is.

In Virginia, Texas and Vermont, for example, officials said they have been combining the results of viral tests, which show an active infection, with antibody tests, which show a past infection. Public health experts say that can make for impressive-looking testing totals but does not give a true picture of how the virus is spreading.

Oh, this doesn't look good:

The ineptitude and failure here was a continuous three-year run in the opposite direction from the actual truth of the story. How many papers have repented in public of their obsessional fascination with Trump the Colluder? How many reporters, who won awards, earned front pages, membership on political panels, conference attendance, and book deals telling the world how Trump and Putin “stole the election,” have come out with their mea culpas, with even a plaintive bleat of “sorry, I guess we had it wrong?”

Interesting:

For the first time in the 108 years since the Titanic sank to the bottom of the ocean, causing the deaths of more than 1,500 people, explorers are set to cut into the ship and remove a piece.

Their target is the wireless Marconi telegraph, one of the first of its kind, which the doomed ocean liner used to contact a nearby ship for aid.

A federal judge in Virginia approved the expedition Monday, calling it “a unique opportunity to recover an artifact that will contribute to the legacy left by the indelible loss of the Titanic.”

Because of a backlog of personal messages, the wireless operators had ignored ice warnings from other ships. Banal good-wishes soon gave way to increasingly desperate calls for help. Operator Jack Phillips died after refusing to leave his flooded post.

“He was a brave man,” his fellow wireless operator told the New York Times a few days later. “I will never live to forget the work of Phillips for the last awful 15 minutes.”

The company R.M.S. Titanic (RMST) still must get a funding plan approved by the court, a prospect made more complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic. It plans to launch the expedition this summer, using underwater robots to carefully detach the Marconi and its components from the ship.

“If recovered, it is conceivable that it could be restored to operable condition,” they said in one filing. “Titanic’s radio — Titanic’s voice — could once again be heard, now and forever.”