Indeed:
On Sunday, hundreds of people weathered the ice and the chill to protest the closure of the Edmonton-area GraceLife church that has been ignoring public health rules for months. On the other side of the country, windows were smashed and garbage torched in Old Montreal as protesters rejected the province’s latest curfew rules, calling for “freedom for the young.” ...
In Montreal, meanwhile, police said seven people were arrested and 107 tickets related to public health violations were given out Sunday evening to protesters.
Nationally, the RCMP said they’ve issued 129 fines related to the federal Quarantine Act since March 2020.
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To begin with, the folks see them as hopelessly arbitrary. The government has not made a strong case for why specific measures, such as lowering capacity in retail stores or banning indoor dining, are necessary, or why regions with exceedingly low infection rates should face punitive new measures. Secondly, across Canada pandemic modelling of case growth has been atrocious. It has not reflected anything close to reality, and the public won’t accept new restrictions based entirely on such faulty models.
Thirdly, the public has grown weary of government constantly moving the goalposts when it comes to lifting restrictions. In Alberta, the public started this pandemic being told to track case numbers and deaths. Earlier this year the government wisely adopted a clearer roadmap back to normalcy that focused on hospitalizations and health system capacity. Now the goalposts are shifted yet again, this time with the government focusing on vaccination rates.
Fourthly, the financial costs associated with the pandemic have been massive. Albertans, who elected the UCP seeking a return to fiscal responsibility, are struggling to understand how this government is managing to out spend the previous NDP administration.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, pandemic restriction fatigue is increasing.
The major problem with lockdowns and other mandatory emergency measures is that over time they tend to lose public support faster than voluntary restrictions. As such mandatory measures can only work effectively in the short term. Think of it as a compliance-based law of diminishing returns.
**
Within the last week, Ontarians have been told that schools should be kept open by the co-chair of the province’s science advisory panel, by a coalition of children’s hospitals and other children’s health providers and by Lecce himself. Last Thursday, he said, “Nothing is more important than keeping Ontario’s schools safe and open for students, staff and their families.” On the weekend, he assured parents schools would reopen after the break.
Closing schools sets off a chain reaction that disrupts parents’ work, the economy, children’s learning and children’s mental health. It’s a big move that lacks a big payback. The past twelve months have shown us that schools are not big transmitters of the COVID-19 virus and Lecce said Monday that 99 per cent of students and teachers did not have an active COVID case as of last Friday.
So schools are safe, but try to wrap your head around the reason Ford and his team offered for closing them. They’re worried that kids will come back to school after the April break and bring the virus into the schools after a week of hanging out with their friends.
So if the break that started Monday hadn’t taken place, schools would have remained safe but because government said take a break, now schools must be closed indefinitely for fear of what might happen when they reopen. To make it worse, Ford and his ministers said the government knew on either Friday or Saturday that they’d have to close schools.
Remember - all of these measures were supposed to be temporary and - with the aid of masks that do not keep the coronavirus microbe out and rubbing one's hands with sticky sanitiser - "flatten the curve".
We have entered Year Two of "this is only temporary".
And what results we've seen!:
Thousands of Canadians failed to undergo proactive cancer screening or diagnosis of possible cancers last year because of the pandemic, leading some doctors and advocates to fear a future surge in advanced tumors and deaths.
(Sidebar: they didn't fail. They were prevented.)
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Travellers entering Canada by air can avoid paying more than $1,000 each for a mandatory quarantine because the federal government will pay the whole bill, Global News has learned.
Rather, we will pay the whole bill and, if any of those passengers are infected, we get to lockdown for the rest of the spring and the summer.
YAY!
**
South Korea restricted the use of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine in people younger than 30 years old over the risk of unusual blood clots, but some experts say a higher age limit is advisable.
Korea University’s infectious disease professor Dr. Kim Woo-joo said the move is “questionable” when the latest research found that blood-clotting conditions were reported in the vaccine’s recipients ranging in age from their early 20s to mid-50s.
For people in their mid to late 50s, benefits of getting the vaccine so far seemed greater than the risks of side effects. But the same could not be said for people aged between 30 and 55, he said.
He said clotting reactions of a milder grade were probably not being picked up by the vaccine safety monitoring in the country. A slight drop in platelet count -- not so much as thrombocytopenia, or abnormally low levels of platelets -- was observed in some younger recipients of the vaccine in their 20s to 30s at the hospital where he is located.
“What Korea is doing now is passive surveillance. But to be able to survey the full spectrum of the side effects,” he said, “recipients -- at least those who are younger -- should be monitored for up to four weeks after inoculation.”
**
Seoul plans to introduce its own social distancing system as an alternative to South Korea’s nationwide rules out of concern for small-business owners.
In a press briefing Monday, Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon said the Seoul Metropolitan Government is preparing to announce new social distancing rules exclusively for the city, as the current nationwide system harms small-business owners and merchants.
The city government is looking to have its municipal social distancing rules ready by the end of the coming weekend. Then it intends to start negotiations with the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency so they can be put into place.
Oh’s office is also planning a trial run of the new system so it achieves its purpose of containing the virus while protecting the interests of business owners.
Many business owners have considered shutting down their businesses since the COVID-19 pandemic started and some already have, Oh said, which is why the city needs new rules that can protect people from the virus while ensuring the financial stability of its economically active population.
“For the past year and four months, disease control authorities have maintained a social distancing system that suspended or limited operation of businesses, and the direction was set on stopping the spread of COVID-19 even with the sacrifice of business owners and merchants,” the mayor said.
“But the results were much different from what we expected. The threat of another virus wave has come to us multiple times, and even as I speak the fourth virus wave is on the verge of starting.”
Mr. Oh lives in a country where failure is not only not tolerated but not rewarded.
It's quite different from Canada where morons like Justin and Tam still get to hold onto their jobs.
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