All physicians, staff and learners at the Kingston, Ont. research and teaching hospital were required to provide proof of having received a first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, or a documented medical reason for not being vaccinated, by Sept. 21. Under the policy, all staff are required to be fully vaccinated by Oct. 22.
The Ministry of Health said since July, it has encouraged all doctors to resume seeing both kids and adults in person.
While August is usually SickKids emergency department’s quietest month, so far this year it’s the busiest with close to 6,000 patients — 40 per cent more than the same month last year, and 15 per cent more than in 2019, said division head Dr. Jason Fischer.
The hospital has also noticed an increase in patients with less serious or “low acuity” illnesses.
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.
Canada is facing a potential wave of terminations tied to mandatory workplace vaccine policies as a growing number of employers require workers to be fully inoculated against COVID-19 — or risk losing their jobs, legal experts say.
President Joe Biden on Wednesday hoped relief was coming for Americans still suffering from the coronavirus pandemic, even as the country passed a grim milestone for deaths from the virus in 2021.
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
I am no fan of Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, or the UCP for that matter, and I think his new regime of draconian restrictions and passport system is absolutely abysmal, but at the same time, it would be dishonest to hold Kenney solely responsible for the current situation. There are clearly forces inside and outside of the government pressuring Kenney and the UCP into blowing up the COVID-19 situation into something worse than it really is.
It’s easy to crow that Canada will have the “strongest” travel measures in the world – and threaten stiff penalties for non-compliance – as the Trudeau government did Wednesday.
The execution is quite a different matter.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unveiled his government’s mandatory vaccine policy today — a mandate that will require public servants to either get their shots by month’s end or be forced into an unpaid leave of absence.
All would-be travellers must also be fully vaccinated by Oct. 30 before boarding planes, trains or marine vessels.
Federal contractors, like cleaning staff, must also be fully vaccinated to gain access to government buildings. The estimated 267,000 employees covered by this policy must report their vaccination status by Oct. 29.
I’m betting a lawsuit or two will be in order.
Documents leaked last month of a grant application submitted to the U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), reveal that the international team of scientists was planning to mix genetic data of closely related strains, and grow new viruses.
h/t Marvin
A letter, allegedly from a Colorado hospital, went viral on social media yesterday because people were so disturbed by what it said. It said that they were moving the person from the list eligible for a kidney transplant to inactive and not currently eligible because that person wasn’t vaccinated for COVID.
New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern has endorsed granting a Mongrel Mob leader special exemption to cross Auckland’s border so he could help minimise Covid-19 spread in hard to reach communities.
The head of the Waikato Mongrel Mob chapter, Sonny Fatupaito, was given essential worker status, which enabled him to enter Auckland last weekend, while the city was under level three lockdown, with a border in place.
