Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the federal government began preparing for a possible pandemic as soon as it received the first alert about a mysterious cluster of pneumonia cases in China on New Year’s Eve.
Trudeau is defending his government against accusations it didn’t act fast enough to warn Canadians about the danger COVID-19 posed to their health and the economy.
Yes, about that:
Jan. 19: A Health Canada briefing note prepared for Health Minister Patty Hajdu states: “Based on the latest information that we have, there is no clear evidence that the virus is easily transmitted between people,” as the CBC’s John Paul Tasker would later reveal in April.
(Sidebar: ahem ..)
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January 29 – (US) The White House announces the formation of a coronavirus taskforce to inform the president on the pandemic
March 4 – (Canada) Trudeau forms coronavirus cabinet committee
January 31 – (US) Trump declares the coronavirus is a public health emergency
February 3 – (Canada) Health Minister Patty Hajdu says Canada does not need to call a public health emergency
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A January 29 briefing note from Dr. Theresa Tam's Public Health Agency of Canada recommended against wearing face coverings while travelling.
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Patty Hajdu, Jan. 27: “Mr. Speaker, I will say that the risk to Canadians remains low.”
— Lorrie Goldstein (@sunlorrie) September 11, 2020
Dr. Theresa Tam, Jan. 29: “Canada’s risk is much, much, lower than that of many other countries. It’s going to be rare …”
Dr. Howard Njoo, Feb. 26: “We have contained the virus." https://t.co/eno4UhDZcl
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The Public Health Agency in a 2019 internal memo boasted it was fully prepared for a pandemic after spending millions stocking federal warehouses. The memo was dated last September 16, three months before the coronavirus was first detected in Wuhan, China: “We want to be as ready as possible.”
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The Department of Health in internal memos boasted it was completely prepared for Covid-19 and “working exactly as it should”. Records show Health Minister Patricia Hajdu believed the risk to Canadians was low as late as March 9, two days before the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic: “This is difficult work as you can imagine.”
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With the China CCP Coronavirus spreading throughout Canada, our country faces a looming shortage of essential Personal Protective Equipment, like masks and protective clothing for doctors and nurses.
And a key reason for that shortage is that Justin Trudeau gave away a whopping 16 TONNES of that equipment.
He gave it to Communist China.
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Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam yesterday said fewer than one in ten Canadians will contract Covid-19 but would not release modeling data used to justify the forecast. One epidemiologist described the claim as “unscientific rubbish”.
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Cabinet waited too long to close the nation’s borders, Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam last night told the Commons health committee. Tam acknowledged foreign visitors should have been prohibited long before cabinet restricted travel: “In hindsight, yes, I think people could act faster.”
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More than 9,000 Canadians are dead, the vast majority of them residents of long-term care facilities in Ontario and Quebec. To borrow Vox’s approach: If Canada had Germany’s COVID-19 death rate — 112 per million instead of 242 — nearly 5,000 more Canadians would be alive today. That’s not a huge ask: Germany has the 20th-lowest death rate among 37 OECD nations. If Canada had matched Slovakia’s remarkable rate of seven per million— better than all Canadian provinces except Newfoundland and Labrador (six), New Brunswick (three) and Prince Edward Island (zero) — only 265 Canadians would have lost their lives.
If Ontario were a sovereign nation, its death rate would rank 28th among 37 OECD countries. Quebec’s would rank 36th.
We don’t yet know how much success and failure was down to luck, and how much to strategy or policy. What we do know is that in the weeks leading up to March 11, as COVID-19 gathered steam abroad, federal public health officials assured the government and the general public alike that the risk to Canada was low, and that our preparedness was adamantine — expertly informed, especially in Ontario, by Justice Archie Campbell’s 2007 report into the almost-disastrous 2003 SARS outbreak in Toronto. (It found widespread unpreparedness and disorganization, and delivered a critical message on the use of personal protective equipment against novel diseases: “reasonable efforts to reduce risk need not await scientific proof.”) ...
For weeks, federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu insisted closing borders would be worse than useless. Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam even implied it was prohibited under the WHO’s International Health Regulations. Then, literally over the Sunday night of March 15-16, it all changed: Ottawa suddenly announced our borders were closing to most international travellers. Whatever confidence this inspired could only have been tempered by its previous disavowal.
In Ottawa, the advice on masks went from “potentially harmful” to “potentially good idea,” conveniently enough just when the critical shortage of PPE for frontline health-care workers abated. Only many weeks later, way behind other countries’ timelines — and long after asymptomatic transmission was a known possibility — did “for God’s sake wear a mask” become a thing. In Ontario, criteria for when people should get tested seemed to expand and contract by the day. It very much appeared they were being tailored to accommodate outrageously limited supplies and glacial turnaround times.
The messaging was insulting, quite apart from anything else. And the poor performance went well beyond the health portfolios.
The federal Liberals tabled legislation, later withdrawn amidst entirely justified howls of protest, that would essentially have appointed Justin Trudeau emperor until Dec. 31, 2021. CBC tried to cancel all its local television newscasts, only to retreat in terror after a public backlash. ...
On the health portfolios, however, there is no redeeming the central, horrendous failure: Many long-term care homes in Quebec and Ontario, in systems long acknowledged to be vulnerable and understaffed, collapsed into scenes of horror requiring actual military intervention. Both province’s governments were relatively new, and no one believes they are solely responsible. But surely to God they should not be getting bonus approval points for not having fixed the problems they inherited.
I'm not seeing how any of this points to this country being prepared or that the powers that be even cared.
Also:
Early data suggests children are much less likely than adults to develop severe cases of COVID-19.
Statistics from the Public Health Agency of Canada reveal only 1.4 per cent of 10,467 infected kids and teens ended up in hospital with the disease, compared to 13.5 per cent of 84,979 cases involving all ages.
That amounted to 149 patients younger than 20 who were hospitalized between April 1 and Aug. 26, 2020, including 29 sent to intensive care. There’s been at least one death in the under-20 set linked to complications from the novel coronavirus, a 19-year-old in Quebec who died in August. However there have been no reported COVID-related deaths in children.
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My dear, this is Canada. You are old and expected to die:
Gibbs was taken by ambulance to hospital in Langley, then transferred to the intensive care unit at Surrey Memorial.
She’s since left the ICU, but remains isolated and on oxygen and has a message for other British Columbians who may feel like the pandemic is over.
“To the young people particularly, you know, you’re young, you want to get on with your life, you want to live your life, I get that,” she said.
“(But) just because I’m old doesn’t mean I want to die. Do you get that?”
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