Unvaccinated foreign national truck drivers are not allowed to cross the border into Canada as of midnight Saturday, while unvaccinated Canadian truck drivers still have a right of return, but must test and isolate for 14 days. The U.S. will also tighten its border restrictions a week later on Jan. 22.
CBC/Radio-Canada has developed two useful websites — “ The state of the pandemic ” and “ COVID-19: The latest numbers ,” which make it easy to make meaningful comparisons of how Canada’s provinces are faring compared to each other and how Canada compares to other countries.
Did Omicron arrive in China’s capital Beijing by mail from Canada?
The Omicron variant of the coronavirus could have entered the Chinese capital Beijing via contaminated mail from Canada, the city’s centre for disease control said on Monday.
Pang Xinghuo, deputy director of the Beijing Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, said the city’s first Covid-19 patient to be diagnosed with the variant had received a letter mailed from Canada on January 7.
“We do not rule out the possibility that the person was infected through contacting an object from overseas,” she said.
h/t FD
Pfizer’s Paxlovid COVID-19 antiviral pill has been approved for use in Canada.
Health Canada announced Monday it has approved Pfizer’s pill for use in the fight against COVID-19. The regulator posted on its website that the drug has received authorization.
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
Ontario reports 23 new COVID-19 deaths; hospitalizations may be at plateau
Ontario reported 23 new deaths on Monday as new hospital admissions and transfers to intensive care appeared to show early signs they were levelling off.
The Ministry of Health said there were 3,887 people in hospital with COVID-19, with 578 people in intensive care.
Monday’s occupancy level is relatively similar to Sunday’s with the caveat that some hospitals do not report COVID-related occupancy on weekends.
3,887 people are hospitalized with #COVID19. Please note that not all hospitals report on weekends.
There are 578 people in ICU with COVID-19.
There are 8,521 new cases of COVID-19.
Today’s numbers will be available at 10:30 a.m. at https://t.co/ypmgZbVRvn.
— Christine Elliott (@celliottability) January 17, 2022
Hundreds of air passengers flouted in-flight mask rules in 2021
More than 1,700 passengers refused to wear masks during flights on Canadian air carriers last year — a problem the union representing many of Canada’s flight attendants says is getting worse.
Figures collected by Transport Canada show that 959 of those cases resulted in enforcement action, ranging from warning letters to fines.
Airlines like Air Canada and WestJet say the vast majority of their passengers respect the rules.
A shocking percentage of Democrats support the enactment of tyrannical Covid-19 measures on unvaccinated people, according to a Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports poll released Thursday.
Well, maybe “shocking” isn’t the correct term given that we’re dealing with hypochondriac, authoritarian leftists drunk with power. Still, when nearly half the members of the ruling political party literally want to see unvaccinated people digitally tracked and forced into “designated facilities,” it’s definitely cause for concern.
On January 23rd, they will begin a “slow roll”, from as many border points as possible, to slow down major road transportation routes across the Country. Truckers, and all others, are invited to join the convoy, to send a message to the Government, that forced vaccinations will not be tolerated.
The case for vaccination against COVID-19 is strong, but instead of trying to persuade the remaining holdouts to get their shots, Canada’s political leaders, and especially Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, have insulted them, used them as a political wedge and trampled on their rights. Time was that the son of the man who brought this country the Charter of Rights and Freedoms would be expected to respect those very rights and freedoms.
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.
I thought this was satire when I first read it.
Nope. https://t.co/NMk8cL1xdW
— Airborne Heel (@abnheel) January 16, 2022
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.
