“China eats weird animals disease”

Toronto Police Det.-Const. Adrienne Gilvesy is the same good cop she was before the coronavirus vaccine arrived.

Her skills, passion and work ethic to keep Toronto safe has not changed. The landscape she works in has.

The vaccine mandate that requires federal employees from core public services to be fully immunized against COVID-19 has constitutional issues that implicate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom, an Ontario lawyer says.

“There are several sections of the Charter of Rights that are implicated by mandating vaccines, generally speaking,” said Ryan O’Connor, a Toronto-based litigator who specializes in areas such as employment and appeals, and also advises clients on matters involving federal and provincial legislation.

Ontario reports 573 new COVID-19 cases; 10 additional deaths

Ontario reported 573 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday along with 10 additional deaths, as the province’s hospital burden continued a slow decline and active cases fell to a fresh multi-month low.

The seven-day rolling average of new cases continues to drop, now standing at 551, down from 565 yesterday and 597 one week ago.

Alarmed by COVID-19, Ontario seniors want to live in their homes as long as possible: poll

Nearly 90 per cent of Ontarians aged 55+ say they want to stay in their own home and remain out of the province’s retirement and long-term care system as long as possible, especially because of what COVID-19 has wrought on those facilities, a new poll finds.

The poll conducted in late September found 89 per cent of respondents plan to stay in their own home or apartment for as long as possible, while four per cent planned to move in to a retirement residence or with a family member.

Who can blame them, LTC homes and hospitals were death traps.

Is it just me, or does it feel like America is running out of everything?

I visited CVS last week to pick up some at-home COVID-19 tests. They’d been sold out for a week, an employee told me. So I asked about paper towels. “We’re out of those too,” he said. “Try Walgreens.” I drove to a Walgreens that had paper towels. But when I asked a pharmacist to fill some very common prescriptions, he told me the store had run out. “Try the Target up the road,” he suggested. Target’s pharmacy had the meds, but its front area was alarmingly barren, like the canned-food section of a grocery store one hour before a hurricane makes landfall.

MONTREAL — There will be no exemptions for religious reasons for health-care workers in Quebec mandated to be fully vaccinated by Oct. 15.

Health Minister Christian Dube made the statement in a news conference Thursday that Quebec would not be following the federal government’s exemption on religious reasons for public servants.

“It’s a question of health not a question of religion,” he said. “I don’t understand the federal position. That’s their choice. For us, there won’t be an exception.”

Government policy on testing is worryingly misleading

There’s been a bit of a Covid outbreak in our neighbourhood, including our eldest child (he’s fine). All the cases were first detected with rapid, at-home “lateral flow” tests, or LFTs.

It is currently government policy that if you get a positive LFT, but then you do the traditional, more accurate PCR and it’s negative, you don’t have to self-isolate any more: you can go back to school or work or whatever. If our child’s LFT had been followed up by a negative PCR, he would be back in school.

Ontario reports 587 new COVID-19 infections, 5 more deaths

Ontario is reporting 587 new COVID-19 cases and five more deaths on Thursday as the seven-day rolling average continues to decline.

Today’s case count is up from the 476 infections logged yesterday but down from the 647 cases reported last Thursday.

Get in line, Canada, the U.S. has bigger problems than its closed border

… Throughout the pandemic, COVID-19 deaths per capita in Mexico have been three times higher than in Canada, and Mexico has at points relied on vaccines from Russia and China that are not approved in the U.S. Aside from that, the politics of the U.S. southern land border are always a lightning rod because of immigration and refugee fights that dominate American partisan politics when they flare up, as they have this year.

For reasons of both public health and political optics, reopening the land border to Mexicans now is a potentially explosive issue.

This is what CAF members have received. Vaccination Refusal is not an option for a service member.

Hmmmm

Less-than-meets-the-eye as #MandatoryVaccination rollout by @CaFreeland exempts 212,000 fed employees & requires less proof than going to a restaurant: "Why?" https://t.co/U5S3vIXlo1 #cdnpoli @PSACnat @TBS_Canada pic.twitter.com/OLfckvVGti

— Blacklock's Reporter (@mindingottawa) October 7, 2021