An Ontario hospital CEO who serves on the province’s COVID-19 science table has been booted from his advisory role after it was revealed that he vacationed in the Dominican Republic as Ontario went into a province-wide lockdown over the holidays.
In a statement Tuesday evening, St. Joseph’s Health System confirmed that its CEO, Dr. Tom Stewart, was out of the country on vacation from Dec. 18 – Jan.5.
Fun Fact! St. Jo’s Hospital is currently battling a Covid outbreak!
Michael Florhaug, 64, reportedly went to an LA Fitness on Dec. 31 in Maplewood to monitor whether gym members were wearing face masks. He is not a member of the gym.
The province of Quebec is expected to announce on Wednesday that they will be implementing an 8-9pm curfew with strict new lockdown rules! Amazingly this announcement comes on the heels of a viral video which showed the Gatineau police aggressively arresting and fining a family of 6 for gathering at home for New Years Eve.
Restricting times and locations people can shop concentrates them, resulting in more virus transmission.
I have spent the bulk of my working life in and around policing. Ordinarily, I would publicly defend the police — especially in cases of citizen journalism. I put context to what we are seeing and silence the baying hounds.
However, after viewing the video of Gatineau Police responding to a neighbour’s complaint of members of a family holding a New Year’s Eve gathering, I cannot defend it for a number of reasons.
For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …?
What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed. Many thoughtful people dismiss this notion, and they may be right. They sincerely believe that the coronavirus arose naturally, “zoonotically,” from animals, without having been previously studied, or hybridized, or sluiced through cell cultures, or otherwise worked on by trained professionals. They hold that a bat, carrying a coronavirus, infected some other creature, perhaps a pangolin, and that the pangolin may have already been sick with a different coronavirus disease, and out of the conjunction and commingling of those two diseases within the pangolin, a new disease, highly infectious to humans, evolved. Or they hypothesize that two coronaviruses recombined in a bat, and this new virus spread to other bats, and then the bats infected a person directly — in a rural setting, perhaps — and that this person caused a simmering undetected outbreak of respiratory disease, which over a period of months or years evolved to become virulent and highly transmissible but was not noticed until it appeared in Wuhan.
A few weeks ago I compared the emergence of the British variant of coronavirus to the twist at the end of a “Twilight Zone” episode. The entire planet spent 2020 waiting for a cure to the plague, and then it arrived to global jubilation just before New Year’s — only to be followed immediately by ominous news that a new strain of the virus had begun to circulate widely.
Every weekend — for months now — protesters gather at Calgary City Hall to protest the provincial and municipal restrictions on civil liberties meant to stem the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.
At the best of times, anybody trying to sell a hard national lockdown is going to have their work cut out for them — and this week would be even harder.
The public is rightly skeptical of the political class telling them to stay home, that would be just ‘for a few weeks’ and we’re all in this together — all while they’re jetting off to a beach.
The Star is Gung Ho – To avoid COVID’s third wave, embrace longer lockdowns, gradual relaxing of restrictions, group urges provinces
“Cuomo and de Blasio are destroying the city,” cried a local restaurateur in a recent radio ad calling on people to visit his homey Italian eatery, where they can “fuggedaboudit.” The sentiment would have fit well in New York, where countless restaurants are struggling to pay rent, and where indoor dining is again banned. The Brooklyn accent griping from my car radio seemed out of place, however, as the Palm Beach trees flew by. The restaurant is in Jupiter, Florida. I’ve never been tempted to make the half-hour drive north from Palm Beach to dine there, but deserting New York for Florida’s warmer climes is easier to understand these days.
Speed up immunizations – that’s the message from some doctors in Canada – as no province has administered more than 50 percent of the COVID-19 doses it has received so far.
Data compiled from the COVID-19 Canada Open Data Working Group reveals the country is administering vaccines at a slower pace than some of its peer countries.
Israel, Britain, the United States and Germany have all inoculated a larger share of their populations, despite Canada being one of the first to start authorizing vaccines.
After the COVID-19 pandemic tossed the world into chaos, the light at the end of the tunnel was the announcement that major pharmaceutical companies had vaccines in development.
Two vaccines, made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, have now been approved for use. As Canada rolls out its vaccination campaign, beginning with frontline workers and later the general population, life may soon return to normality.
Ambulance workers in Los Angeles County, California, have been told not to transport hospital patients that have extremely low chances of survival.
The directive comes as officials say the region could soon hit over 1,000 Covid-related deaths per day, and hospitals are overrun with patients.LA ambulances told not to transport some patients
Emergency workers have also been told to ration oxygen, which is in short supply due to the pandemic.
Hospital beds in LA are running low and officials fear a post-holiday spike.
The World Health Organization is beginning an investigation into the scientific origins of the coronavirus. They’ve assembled a blue-ribbon panel of doctors, researchers, and scientists to get to the bottom of the mystery.
As it turns out, investigative reporter Nicholson Baker did most of the work for them. Writing in New York Magazine, Baker reveals a horror story about an accidental release of the coronavirus deliberately created in a lab funded by U.S. tax dollars.
The real issue with so many politicians of all political stripes flying out of the country over the Christmas/New Year holiday isn’t that they ignored the advice of their own governments not to do so.
It’s that they’ve undermined the credibility of government-imposed public health measures and lockdowns to fight the pandemic, and handed their fiercest critics an argument about why they’re unnecessary and extreme.
