“China eats weird animals disease”

New modelling released today by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) suggests the highly transmissible Omicron variant will push hospital admissions to “extremely high levels” in the coming weeks as case counts reach levels never before seen in this country.

While there is a lot of uncertainty about how many new infections are being reported each day due to ongoing COVID-19 testing restraints, PHAC said the current test positivity rate suggests the variant is running rampant and there will be “several weeks of very intense activity expected to come.”

Nationally, the positivity rate is a stunning 28 per cent. That means more than one in four tests for the virus are coming back positive — nearly five times higher than the rate at any other point in the pandemic.

Novak Djokovic is set to be detained on Saturday after Australia cancelled his visa for a second time, in a row over his right to remain in the country unvaccinated.

The decision on “health and good order” grounds means he faces deportation and a three-year visa ban.

Djokovic’s lawyers called the decision “patently irrational” and will appeal.

The men’s tennis number one is still scheduled to play in the Australian Open in Melbourne on Monday.

Health officials in Vancouver say they’re aware of cases of people trying to pay vulnerable people in the city’s Downtown Eastside to get vaccinated for them so they can fraudulently obtain a COVID-19 vaccine passport.

The Vancouver Coastal Health authority would not confirm how many cases were involved, but confirmed that at least a handful of reports people did obtain bogus BC Vaccine Cards through what it called “deplorable” behaviour.

Ottawa allocated $300-million at the beginning of the pandemic for the construction of 15 mobile hospitals, but only four 100-bed units have been completed and they are sitting in storage despite the strain on hospitals caused by Omicron across the country.

The federal government gave a sole-sourced contract of up to $150-million to a joint venture between SNC-Lavalin and Pacific Architects and Engineers (SNC-PAE) in April, 2020, to build five mobile respiratory-care hospitals that can be set up in existing structures such as conference centres and indoor skating arenas.

A similar multimillion-dollar contract went to Weatherhaven Global Resources Ltd. for 10 stand-alone field hospitals that can be deployed either in urban or remote areas.

Go incognito.

The NIH bioethics boss, a specialist in “human subjects” research, explains it all for you.

“This book was written by the author in her private capacity. Opinions expressed are her own. No official support or endorsement by the NINR [National Institute of Nursing Research] the NIH [National Institutes of Health] or other agencies is intended or should be inferred regarding the views presented here.”

Those are the first words a reader encounters in The Search for an AIDS Vaccine: Ethical Issues in the Development and Testing of a Preventative HIV Vaccine, by Christine Grady, from Indiana University Press back in 1995. In the acknowledgments, doubts begin to rise.

In private, they said it was plausible. In public, they called it a conspiracy theory.

In August 2007 there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth virus on a farm in Surrey. It was a few miles from the world’s leading reference laboratory for identifying outbreaks of foot and mouth. Nobody thought this was a coincidence and sure enough a leaking pipe at the laboratory was soon found to be the source: a drainage contractor had worked at the lab and then at the farm.

Canada’s urban exodus picked up steam into the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, with tens of thousands of people leaving Toronto and Montreal for smaller cities or rural areas, official data showed on Thursday.

More than 64,000 people left Toronto for other parts of Ontario from mid-2020 to mid-2021, up 14 per cent from the previous 12-month period, according to Statistics Canada population estimates, with another 6,600 moving out of province.

Montreal, Canada’s second-largest city, lost nearly 40,000 residents to other areas of Quebec, up 60 per cent on the year, with another 3,600 moving out of province.

Good timing! Toronto’s proposed budget for 2022 includes largest property tax hike of Tory’s tenure

Governments are stepping up their efforts to convince people to get inoculated against COVID-19, with Quebec becoming the first province to announce a special tax on the unvaccinated.

The move, announced by Premier François Legault on Tuesday, mirrors that of European nations that have forged ahead with a form of mandatory vaccination.

Ekstra Bledet, a major newspaper in Denmark, apologized for publicizing government-issued COVID-19 information unquestioningly rather than conducting independent investigations in an article titled “We Failed.”