“China eats weird animals disease”

While the peasants locked themselves in their homes and connected with family through windows and cellphones, Ontario’s now-former finance minister, Rod Phillips, jetted off to St. Barts. On the day he left the country – shirking recommendations against international travel that have been in place for the better part of the year – almost 2,000 people were newly diagnosed with COVID-19 in the province.

Pretty scathing. Go incognito.

The number of deaths in Ontario’s long-term-care homes is showing a worrying trend, an analysis by the Star reveals.

The data is the latest to pull back the curtain on the mounting toll COVID-19 has taken on care homes, which have been ravaged by the pandemic, exposing systemic and long-standing issues to deadly effect.

To date, 2,749 residents of the province’s long-term-care homes have died.

How is Canada doing in the fight against COVID-19? Not so well if we compare ourselves to other countries.

Last summer, when daily new cases were low and the economy was bouncing back, Canadians gave their governments high marks as managers of the fight against COVID-19. But now they have become more critical as new cases keep rising, lockdowns have been reimposed, and the economy stalls.

Over one-third of Americans believe the media exaggerated the threat of the Chinese coronavirus, although 50 percent approve of the media’s overall coverage, a Rasmussen Reports survey released Thursday found.

Rasmussen Reports conducted the survey December 28-29, among 1,000 American adults, asking them to rate the media’s overall coverage of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.

COVID-19 lockdowns, restrictions and physical distancing amid the coronavirus pandemic have left more than half of Canadians feeling lonely or isolated, according to a new Ipsos poll conducted exclusively for Global News.

“I think Blursday has set in,” Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos, said, referring to the term coined in 2020 as people struggled to keep track of what day of the week it was during lockdown periods.

The coronavirus is entirely natural. And there’s no reason to think otherwise. Apart from how much the outbreak benefited China. And how relentless it is in silencing reporters, medical professionals, and… bat researchers.

Thanks in large part to Covid lockdowns, this year has left vast wreckage in its wake, with ten million jobs lost, more than 100,000 businesses and dozens of national chains bankrupted or closed. Up to 40 million people could face eviction in the coming months for failing to pay rent, and Americans report that their mental health is at record low levels. But the casualty list for 2020 must also include many of the political myths that shape Americans’ lives.

Perhaps the biggest myth to die this year was that Americans’ constitutional rights are safeguarded by the Bill of Rights.

Retired doctors are apparently required to undergo diversity training before they can help administer vaccines.

After a year of the Covid pandemic, the rollout of the vaccine promises to be the light at the end of the tunnel. And while the work to develop and test the vaccines has been done successfully and at record speed, the rollout poses an enormous logistical challenge.

In the UK, retired doctors are volunteering to become Covid vaccinators to speed up the process. But the bureaucratic hurdles to volunteering are bordering on the absurd.