Author: Blazingcatfur

Canada has fewer intensive care beds than almost anyone else in the developed world

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is an international body roughly comprising all the world’s developed liberal democracies. When ranked against its OECD contemporaries, Canada currently comes fourth last in terms of intensive care beds available per capita (only Chile, Sweden and Colombia ranked lower). Canada had just 1.97 ICU beds for every 100,000 residents. The top-ranked country, Japan, had 7.74 beds per 100,000.

Schneider Transport has put its Guelph, Ont., property for sale and informed associates it is closing its Canada-based operations.

“Today, Jan. 14, 2022, we are announcing a change in the company’s approach to Canadian-based operations,” the company told Trucknews.com in a written statement, responding to questions about its Canadian operations.

Company says its decision is unrelated to Covid policy but I wonder.

Trucker vaccination policy will harm food chain

The federal government’s plan to require all truckers entering from the United States to show proof of vaccination creates some serious problems.

Vaccines are the most effective way to reduce risks associated with COVID-19, stop the spread of the virus and save lives. No doubt. But the situation affecting the trucking industry could be challenging and impact food access for Canadians.

h/t J

From the moment COVID-19 appeared, the pandemic became inseparable from politics.

Political frenzy was inevitable because the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have escaped from a level-4 security virology lab in Wuhan, China. The rapid-fire spread soon threatened to indict the Chinese communist government for nearly destroying the world economy and killing millions.

Western elites, in response, feared that their own lucrative investments in China would be jeopardized by such disclosures — and so acted accordingly in defending Beijing.

Together with guarded hopes that the decline of the omicron COVID-19 wave marks the beginning of the end of the pandemic comes the question: what happens when it has finally run its course? What will the post-pandemic world be like? The most likely scenario is that it will unleash the greatest political jailbreak since the end of the second world war. Only a few months after Hitler’s armies surrendered, the British electorate, eager to put the restrictions of war behind them, handed Winston Churchill a landslide defeat and replaced him with Clement Atlee. Once victory removed the rationale for all the regulations they had willingly accepted, they set about removing them. With the end of the current pandemic, the justification for lockdowns, masks, mandates, tracking, and restrictions on the public will similarly vanish and the desire for a new world will be unleashed.

We are now two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, and no doubt everyone is frustrated and emotionally and physically fatigued from it all. We have cycled through what now feels like an infinite number of “waves” of peak infections, and their accompanying public health restrictions. The latter have ranged from face mask mandates and school and business closures, to travel restrictions and vaccine passports. And now the prospect of truly mandatory vaccinations, with Quebec promising “significant” financial penalties for those not vaccinated, could cause already simmering tensions in the country to become combustible.