“China eats weird animals disease”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is meeting with his cabinet on Sunday to discuss additional public health restrictions, CBC News has learned.

Two sources, who spoke with CBC News on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, said the cabinet meeting is being held Sunday afternoon.

Ontario reintroduced capacity limits at restaurants, bars and retailers on Dec. 19, in an effort to slow the spread of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.

Ontario hospitals facing staffing challenges as COVID cases continue to mount

TORONTO — Ontario hospitals are feeling the brunt of soaring COVID-19 case counts as the virus rips through the province at record speed and infects high numbers of patients and health care workers.

The situation has become so serious that some hospital networks are reporting hundreds of their staff members have tested positive for the virus, are symptomatic or are in isolation after an exposure.

Pastor Artur Pawlowski and his brother Dawid Pawlowski, who gained notoriety last year as the heads of Calgary’s health order-defying Street Church, were arrested on Saturday evening after attending a protest that allegedly took place outside Alberta Health Minister Jason Copping’s home.

The unseemly rush by governments to vilify Canadians refusing to be vaccinated as the root of all evil ignores the fact government actions throughout the pandemic have contributed to vaccine hesitancy.

To begin with, it is a myth to claim everyone who refuses to be vaccinated is irresponsible, reckless, racist, misogynist, throws stones at the prime minister or demonstrates outside hospitals.

There was a distinctive moment, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, that neatly encapsulated the mistakes and confusion of Britain’s early efforts to tackle the disease, says Mark Woolhouse. At a No 10 briefing in March 2020, cabinet minister Michael Gove warned the virus did not discriminate. “Everyone is at risk,” he announced.

And nothing could be further from the truth, argues Professor Woolhouse, an expert on infectious diseases at Edinburgh University. “I am afraid Gove’s statement was simply not true,” he says. “In fact, this is a very discriminatory virus. Some people are much more at risk from it than others. People over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15.”

In its recently updated guidance on exposure to COVID-19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) treats double jabbed individuals that have not received a booster shot the same as unvaccinated ones.

“For people who are unvaccinated or are more than six months out from their second mRNA dose (or more than 2 months after the J&J vaccine) and not yet boosted, CDC now recommends quarantine for 5 days followed by strict mask use for an additional 5 days,” the updated guidance reads. “Alternatively, if a 5-day quarantine is not feasible, it is imperative that an exposed person wear a well-fitting mask at all times when around others for 10 days after exposure. Individuals who have received their booster shot do not need to quarantine following an exposure, but should wear a mask for 10 days after the exposure.”

The illogic of the Pandemic Reign of Error is long past the point of too much to bear.

As Covid infections have surged beyond control — breaking through vaccines and boosters — the CDC now says that we have to reduce the number of isolation days for people who test positive for the virus but are basically asymptomatic. Our Phil Klein has elaborated on the arbitrariness of it all. Naturally, leave it to our Janus-faced megalomaniac, Dr. Anthony L’Science C’est Moi Fauci, to supply the risible rationalization du jour: “If you are asymptomatic and you are infected, we want to get people back to the jobs, especially those with essential jobs.”

Ontario health officials are reporting another record-breaking number of new COVID-19 cases as more than 18,000 infections are logged on Saturday.

Public Health Ontario, which released the data, confirmed 18,445 new cases of the novel coronavirus today, surpassing the previous record of 16,713 new COVID-19 infections reported on Friday.

Two Ontario epidemiologists are warning that recent changes to the province’s COVID-19 pandemic strategy risk uncontrolled transmission of the virus, while at the same time, limiting the ability to measure its spread.

Raywat Deonandan, epidemiologist and associate professor at the University of Ottawa, and Colin Furness, infection control epidemiologist and associate professor at the University of Toronto, both say they aren’t convinced the province’s new approach will be able to protect Ontarians and the broader health system from the impact of a surge of the highly-infectious Omicron variant.

“There seems to be an acceptance that transmission will be out of control the next few weeks and maybe there is a silent hope that unrestrained transmission might result in sufficient immunity in the population without much cost,” said Deonandan.