“China eats weird animals disease”

It is time for practically every jurisdiction in the western world to acknowledge that they have dismally failed to manage the COVID crisis. We almost all failed to learn promptly from the unfolding facts of the illness. It seems now to be fairly well-established that the Chinese, with the complicity of the World Health Organization on which it has excessive influence, withheld the gravity of coronavirus from the world while allowing it to be exported around the globe, before suppressing it within China in the most authoritarian manner. China gained a great strategic victory as the rest of the world closed down like idiots. In the United States, the wall-to-wall anti-Trump national political media and Democratic party strategists saw very quickly an opportunity to retrieve an election that, as the coronavirus pandemic began, appeared likely to be won by President Donald Trump.

I remember writing around New Year’s that although cases in the U.S. were exploding, deaths had actually dropped slightly over the preceding two weeks. That was evidence that the new variant wasn’t just milder than its predecessors but a hopeful sign that it might be supplanting Delta in the population, driving the old variant to extinction.

If you are an adult Canadian who has not received a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, you are barred from virtually all forms of government employment. By federal mandate, hundreds of unvaccinated police officers, health-care workers, bus drivers and firefighters were placed onto unpaid leave just before Christmas and are explicitly barred from collecting Employment Insurance.

One of the largest hospital systems in the country is dropping its policy that counted race as a more important factor in determining COVID-19 treatment options than diabetes, obesity, asthma, and hypertension combined.

This silliness was allowed at SSM Health, a nominally Catholic health system that operates 23 hospitals across Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin. All hospital patients are “scored” as a means of triage in order to give those most in need priority treatment. SSM Health ignored the severity of a patient’s conditions in order to make race a weightier determining factor.

Customer in an Etobicoke Costco is arrested and hauled away by cops for not wearing a mask despite having a medical exemption.

Allegedly one of the managers of the store is detaining the man alongside police.

It's for your health. pic.twitter.com/dvI3jo2oeU

— Efron Monsanto 🇨🇦 (@realmonsanto) January 15, 2022

Utah is facing legal action over its move to include race as a determining factor in treatment decisions

Health authorities in Utah and Minnesota have come under pressure after claims emerged that non-whites were given two extra points on a risk-based scorecard for deciding whether patients would receive Covid antibody treatment.

On Wednesday, Fox News reported that America First Legal, a conservative law group founded by former Donald Trump ally Stephen Miller, was threatening the states of Utah and Minnesota with legal action.

The Department of National Defence says formal proceedings have been launched against more than 900 members of the Canadian Armed Forces for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

Chief of the defence staff Gen. Wayne Eyre ordered all military personnel to attest to having been fully vaccinated by mid-October. The deadline was later extended to mid-December.

Even as the Omicron variant sweeps around the world, public health officials have noted that, in most cases, the number of Covid patients in hospitals remains significantly lower than during previous pandemic surges.

That’s not the case in the US, however, where the number of patients with the coronavirus currently in hospital has reached record numbers.

According to data from the Department of Health and Human Services, 145,982 people were in hospital with the virus on 11 January, surpassing a previous record set in January 2021.

Similarly, hospitals in large parts of neighbouring Canada have also seen surges, with Quebec reporting a pandemic high last weekend.