“China eats weird animals disease”

“…Now we know how the damage control plan is going to roll out. Rather than addressing the matter personally, Cuomo sent out state Health Commissioner, Howard Zucker to do the dirty work. Zucker has found the talking point they’re going to stick with, and it’s painfully obvious that they haven’t come up with much of a cover story. They’re claiming that there was no undercount and everyone is just arguing about semantics.”

N.Y. Severely Undercounted Virus Deaths in Nursing Homes, Report Says

The state attorney general, Letitia James, said it’s likely that the Cuomo administration failed to report thousands of Covid-19 deaths of nursing home residents.

Pfizer and BioNTech is now failing to deliver the previously expected amount of vaccines to Canada. The result, of course, is confusion and outrage among politicians and the public.

Government officials, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, have repeatedly assured Canadians that the interruption in vaccine supply won’t jeopardize Canada’s goal to inoculate most Canadians by September this year. These assurances have become stock phrases for almost every question asked in parliament.

Canada’s main airlines have agreed to cancel service to the Caribbean and Mexico and the federal government is introducing new mandatory quarantine rules as they try to discourage international travel.

This morning Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Air Canada, WestJet, Sunwing and Air Transat have agreed to suspend service to some sun destinations right away and will be making arrangements with their customers who are in these regions now to organize flights home.

“With the challenges we currently face with COVID-19, both here at home and abroad, we all agree that now is just not the time to be flying,” said Trudeau outside his home at Rideau Cottage.

Ontario is reporting 1,837 cases of #COVID19 and over 69,000 tests completed. Locally, there are 595 new cases in Toronto, 295 in Peel, and 170 in York Region.

As of 8:00 p.m. yesterday, 327,455 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered.

— Christine Elliott (@celliottability) January 29, 2021

Trudeau to announce new measures to restrict travel abroad during COVID-19 pandemic

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expected to announce Friday new measures aimed at further restricting international travel as more infectious variants of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 spread around the globe.

Trudeau has urged Canadians for weeks not to take any non-essential trips outside the country.

And he has warned that the federal government could impose restrictions at any time that would make it harder for them to return.

This blog was published on RT-com, after much discussion and a few changes. It can be seen here  It took a few days. The editors were concerned about the fact-checkers having a go at it and demanding retraction.

We went back and forward. I assured them that all my quoted facts were correct, so the fact-checkers could only attack the ‘opinion’ stated. Which they may well do. If so, fact checkers are no longer checking facts, they are decreeing which scientific opinions are correct, and which are wrong.

h/t RM

In both lives and livelihoods, the poorest have borne the brunt of our disastrous response to the pandemic.

Coronavirus might discriminate by age but lockdown discriminates by class. From the moment this disastrous policy was instigated, it became immediately apparent that we were not all in it together. In every single aspect of life, the working class has suffered most during lockdown. Worse still, over the course of the past year, class inequalities have grown wider and have become more entrenched. And yet, at each turn, left-wing lockdown lovers have demanded ever-more severe restrictions on people’s lives.

When the going gets tough, Justin Trudeau goes into hiding.

For the second week in a row, the Prime Minister allowed Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin to deliver the bad news on reduced vaccine shipments.

A highly-contagious coronavirus mutation first found in Britain will become the dominant strain in Ontario sometime in March, provincial modellers predict, narrowing the room for error as the province enters a period of sustained case decline.

Ontario Science Table Co-Chair Dr. Adalsteinn Brown told reporters it is now only a matter of time before the B.1.1.7 coronavirus variant becomes the dominant strain.

“Perhaps most worryingly the new variants of concern of the mutate SARS-COVID-2 virus are clearly spreading in the community and will likely be the dominant version of the virus in March,” he said on Thursday afternoon.

Canada falls to 20th in the world for vaccine doses administered

Canada has fallen behind other developed nations in the number of shots administered per capita as supply disruptions derail planned vaccinations.

According to data collated by the University of Oxford-based Our World in Data, Canada now ranks 20th globally, well behind allies like the United States and the United Kingdom but also middle-income countries like Poland and Serbia.