Jan. 29: Canada now has three cases. Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer,on Twitter: “I am concerned about the growing number of reports of racism and stigmatizing comments on social media directed to people of Chinese and Asian descent related to 2019-nCoV coronavirus… Everyone has a part to play in preventing the spread of the virus. The Chinese community and all travellers from affected areas are a key part of these efforts….Racism, discrimination and stigmatizing language are unacceptable and very hurtful. These actions create a divide of Us Vs Them. Canada is a country built on the deep-rooted values of respect, diversity and inclusion.” ...
Jan. 29: Liberal MP Marcus Powlowski, a doctor from Thunder Bay, Ont., questions Dr. TheresaTam at the Parliamentary Health Committee: “The BBC was reporting today that their ministry of health was asking all people coming from China to voluntarily self-isolate for two weeks upon returning to the country, I think because the idea is that it got out of Wuhan. When you look at the numbers and what’s happening in China, it’s not isolated to Wuhan. It would seem to me to be a fairly feasible thing for us to do, and a precautionary thing, to have anyone coming from China self-isolate for two weeks. Have you considered making that recommendation, potentially under the Quarantine Act? I don’t know if there’s a means to enforce that.”
Tam replies, defending the policy of voluntary self-isolation of only those travellers showing clear symptoms: “Right now, we have protocols in place, together with the provinces and territories, on isolating cases. Certainly, doing rigorous contact tracing and monitoring is the key to preventing any spread from a case in Canada. That, I think, is of primary importance. For other completely asymptomatic people, currently there’s no evidence that we should be quarantining them.”
Tam stresses the need to work to have affected communities work with everyone else. “Otherwise, they’ll be stigmatized. They will be asked to take measures beyond what is currently the public health evidence. It is a matter of balance when you’re restricting someone’s freedom, essentially, to move about in the community after return. I think that is not something that we would take lightly.”
But now:
Travellers coming into Canada will be forced into mandatory hotel quarantines, part of a suite of measures designed to keep Canadians at home as the government grows increasingly concerned about the risk of new COVID variants that appear to be more transmissible.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the quarantines and several other restrictions on Friday outside Rideau Cottage.
(Sidebar: where he is hiding and has been for the past week.)
Isn't this measure draconian or even necessary as many have suggested for well over a year?
Yes, and the people who could have done something about it didn't:
The data shows that, as of the time of writing, 33 flights landed at Montreal’s Pierre-Elliott Trudeau Airport between January 12 and January 23 carrying passengers with confirmed COVID-19 cases.
The flights arrived from 12 countries including the U.S., Morocco, Mexico, and France.
Oh, how things have changed!
The truth of the matter is that no installed or appointed seat-warmer has any idea what he or she is doing, never has and has no intention of fixing a clearly broken system but what is known is that history (or China - take one's pick) has presented a rare opportunity to make the gullible public follow stickers on the floor because it is flat-out scared of thinking for one's self and would rather have anyone, even a total moron like Justin and his merry band of contrary "experts", do the thinking around here.
That is a zero-sum game.
The appearance of doing something solid, however, is good enough to fool the ovine voter, even one who might be questioning how long he or she can live in Cheetos and paper towels in this the second lockdown that, once again, has achieved absolutely nothing.
FTS can become, at the extreme, an ideology. Canada has already seen that in effect, in the refusal to exempt homeless people from Quebec’s curfew order. Quebec’s premier argued that if the gendarmerie were prohibited from ticketing homeless people from being on the street at quarter past eight, then other people would pretend to be homeless, thus weakening the FTS-mandated curfew. But FTS does not mandate a curfew in the first place, and certainly does not tell you if Quebecers are inclined to fake homelessness in the dead of winter. That is the premier’s psychological and moral assessment of his fellow citizens, which is not physics.
Also - science is different in other parts of the country:
The Ontario government routinely assures us that everything it does is based on science. If so, science in Ontario must be unique, because every other province has opened schools, even provinces with higher per-capita case rates than Ontario.
**
Andrew Cuomo is a son-of-a-b!#ch:
New York’s nursing-home death toll from COVID-19 may be more than 50 percent higher than officials claim — because Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration hasn’t revealed how many of those residents died in hospitals, state Attorney General Letitia James announced Thursday.
In a damning, 76-page report, James also said that some unidentified nursing homes apparently underreported resident fatalities to the state Department of Health and failed to enforce infection-control measures — with more than 20 currently under investigation.
The bombshell findings could push the current DOH tally of 8,711 deaths to more than 13,000, based on a survey of 62 nursing homes that found the state undercounted the fatalities there by an average of 56 percent.
The report further notes that at least 4,000 residents died after the state issued a controversial, March 25 Cuomo administration mandate for nursing homes to admit “medically stable” coronavirus patients — which James said “may have put residents at increased risk of harm in some facilities.”
**
But everyone kept saying that is was so safe!:
“While pregnancy puts women at a higher risk of severe COVID-19, the use of this vaccine in pregnant women is currently not recommended, unless they are at risk of high exposure,” the official WHO status report released Tuesday reads.
Experts now advise people who are pregnant to avoid receiving the Moderna vaccine unless they are health care workers in a facility treating coronavirus patients, or if they have a medical condition that would put them at a higher risk of COVID-19 fatality.
**
They wouldn't be poor if they could work:
The world’s third-largest economy has seen a relatively small coronavirus outbreak so far, with a four-figure death toll and largely without the drastic lockdowns seen in other countries.
With an unemployment rate below 3% and a reputation for a strong social safety net, Japan also appears well placed to weather the pandemic’s economic fallout.
But campaigners say the most vulnerable have still been hit hard, with statistics masking the high rate of underemployment and poorly paid temporary work.
“The pandemic, rising joblessness and falling wages have directly hit the working poor, people who were barely getting by before,” said Ren Ohnishi, who heads the Moyai Support Centre for Independent Living, an anti-poverty group.
Lockdowns have consequences.
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