“China eats weird animals disease”

With no robust system to identify genetic variations of the coronavirus, experts warn that the United States is woefully ill-equipped to track a dangerous new mutant, leaving health officials blind as they try to combat the grave threat.

The variant, which is now surging in Britain and burdening its hospitals with new cases, is rare for now in the United States. But it has the potential to explode in the next few weeks, putting new pressures on American hospitals, some of which are already near the breaking point.

The United States has no large-scale, nationwide system for checking coronavirus genomes for new mutations, including the ones carried by the new variant. About 1.4 million people test positive for the virus each week, but researchers are only doing genome sequencing — a method that can definitively spot the new variant — on fewer than 3,000 of those weekly samples. And that work is done by a patchwork of academic, state and commercial laboratories.

‘SPOTS TAKEN’: Warning about vaccine queue jumping sent to University Health Network staff

Individuals associated with University Health Network (UHN) in Toronto attempted to jump the COVID-19 vaccine queue by inappropriately accessing an online scheduling tool, a notice to staff says.

“Unfortunately, we have learned that in spite of very clear messaging, some staff and learners have provided access to the COVID-19 vaccine scheduling tool and posted links to the tool on social media and via email,” a notice sent out to staff last week by the vaccination committee says.

A new research report by the Department of National Defence suggests the longer the COVID-19 pandemic rages, the stronger right-wing extremism and other threats in Canada and around the world are likely to become.

The report prepared by the Defence Department’s research arm lays out a range of political, economic and security challenges that could emerge — or become more prominent — depending on how long the pandemic remains.

To that end, it looks at what may happen in a best-case scenario that would see COVID-19 brought under control by the end of this year, as well as the potential ramifications should the pandemic last past 2023 and — as a worst case — 2025.

The only extremism has been by governments and their thugs.

Ontario is reporting more than 3,000 new cases of the novel coronavirus for a third consecutive day as hospitalizations continue to surge.

The province reported 3,266 new infections of COVID-19 on Wednesday and 37 additional deaths.

Ontario logged 3,128 new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday, 3,270 on Monday and 2,964 on Sunday.

Premier Ford considering overnight curfew in Ontario: ‘Let’s see where the numbers go’

Could a curfew be under consideration in Ontario?

With Quebec in talks to make a final decision on the safety measure, Premier Doug Ford said he wants to see where COVID-19 cases go in the next little while before implementing something similar for the province.

“Everything is on the table but let’s see where the numbers go,” the Premier said on Tuesday. “I’ll have a discussion over the next day or so with Premier [Francois] Legault.”

Not one criminal should be vaccinated ahead of any vulnerable Canadian or front line health worker.https://t.co/4B22ELE2uf

— Erin O’Toole (@erinotoole) January 6, 2021

I’ll say this for Justin Trudeau, the man knows how to read the political winds.

It was just two weeks ago that he and his team were claiming that any discussion of problems with COVID at the border was nothing more than a distraction being driven by conservatives.

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.

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

This shocking death will not be recorded as a COVID-19 death statistic.

But it should be.