Letting the Pets Out of the Crates

Oh, yay!

A brief reprieve:

Ontario will start its economic reopening a few days ahead of schedule on Friday, loosening restrictions on outdoor activities and businesses.

The province announced the move on Monday, saying health indicators have improved enough to begin lifting some pandemic restrictions.

Limited outdoor dining, outdoor fitness classes, outdoor religious services and camping can resume under the first step of the plan.

Outdoor gatherings of up to 10 people are also permitted and more retail businesses can open for in-person sales with capacity restrictions.

 

Now can we start talking about the total bullsh-- that put us here?:

Should proof emerge that the virus came from a research lab, and not (for example) a meat-and-fish market, the discovery would make headlines globally. It might also precipitate a free fall in China’s relationship with the outside world — even if nations simply come to believe that the balance of the evidence suggests that China is covering up a lapse at one of its labs (since a smoking gun may never be forthcoming).

Such a shift in views about the origins of the virus would deal a severe blow to China’s soft power. Awareness of that possibility helps to explain why the nation has been so sensitive about this subject. Chinese officials have not only hotly denied the possibility of a lab leak, they have even downplayed that China was the source of the virus in any way. They have argued that the pandemic had multiple origin points (including India), was spread through imported frozen food or escaped from a U.S. army lab at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Md. If the Wuhan-leak hypothesis comes to be seen as true, all of that propaganda would be exposed as such — particularly if a cover-up was involved.

China has, until now, enjoyed prestige on the world stage for its containment of the pandemic, especially compared with many Western countries. But if missteps by Chinese scientists were the cause of that pandemic, such praise would quickly fade. The self-proclaimed superiority of China’s authoritarian approach in handling the coronavirus would be severely undercut. (The United States’ successful vaccine rollout has already begun to change the equation.) If it started the fire, how much credit does China get for putting it out more quickly than its neighbours?

 

Let's try "none" and work from there. 

Also:

A California county is revising its COVID-19 death total after a review found that a quarter of the deaths that were attributed to COVID-19 were not caused by the disease. ...

At issue was the definition the county was using to count COVID-19 deaths, requiring only that a patient tested positive for the virus when they died, even if they did not die as a direct result of the virus. In one such case, a person who tested positive for COVID-19 and died in a car crash was recorded as a COVID-19 death.

The revised count now shows the county has recorded 1,223 COVID-19 deaths, down from 1,634. The 411 cases removed from the list is a 25% reduction in overall virus deaths for the county.

The county said it decided to make the revision after a careful reading of state guidelines, with officials saying the new count will more accurately reflect the effect the disease has had on the county.