Toronto is bracing for surging COVID-19 rates in the new year, starting with further restrictions on businesses.
Dr. Eileen De Villa, the city’s chief medical officer of health, said on Wednesday that Toronto will announce new restrictions on businesses early next week in an effort to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.
On a day frequently marked by celebrations involving large amounts of alcohol, Canada’s chief public health officer is again asking Canadians to go easy on the drinking as they turn the page on 2020.
“As the new year approaches, many of us will be looking for ways to celebrate. For some, these festivities will include serving and drinking alcohol, while others may find this season difficult due to distance from friends and family,” Dr. Theresa Tam said in a media statement issued Friday.
The mayor of a small town in Oregon has had enough. Stan Pulliam, the Republican mayor of Sandy, Oregon, has heard from business owners. He’s heard from citizens. He’s even heard from the governor. He has asked the question, over and over, where’s the evidence that lockdowns and the related economic devastation has worked to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic?
Sainted Irish Mother is in Hospital.
She was scheduled to be transferred to another facility this week, until Covid broke out in the department she was headed for.
So she was being held in place until an alternate destination could be found.
Today I received a call saying she has been placed in isolation for 14 days after being exposed to a covid positive staffer.
She is fine and covid free – so far but she is 95 with underlying conditions so that is worrisome.
Ugh.
A woman in the UK was arrested by police after she filmed a video inside an almost completely empty hospital and posted it online.
The clip shows the woman walking through virtually empty corridors and filming empty wards at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital.
H/T T
Ontario is reporting 3,328 cases of #COVID19 and nearly 63,900 tests completed. Locally, there are 888 new cases in Toronto, 431 in Peel, 418 in York Region, 257 in Windsor-Essex County and 194 in Ottawa.
— Christine Elliott (@celliottability) December 31, 2020
Province needs to call in the military again to help Ontario’s long-term-care homes, says health coalition head
Measures taken to protect those in Ontario’s long-term-care homes have been a failure and the military should once again be sent into the facilities, says the executive director of the Ontario Health Coalition.
Natalie Mehra said, as the second wave of COVID-19 continues to ravage Ontario, the conditions inside long-term-care homes for the elderly are at an all-time low.
In an attempt to cut down on the spread of COVID-19, B.C. health officials are stopping liquor sales provincewide at 8 p.m. on New Year’s Eve.
The emergency measure includes liquor sales at bars and restaurants.
YAKIMA, Wash. – A coronavirus outbreak at a Costco store in Yakima County has infected 145 employees, and health officials say the rapid increase in cases at the store is similar to a “superspreader event” in which multiple people are infected at the same time.
The findings were released Tuesday by the Yakima County Health District after store-wide testing at the Costco in Union Gap.
All 145 employees that have tested positive are in isolation or quarantine, but the store itself remains open, officials said. The store employs a total of 383 people.
A 24-year-old Vancouver man spent Christmas night in jail after repeatedly hosting parties that violated COVID-19 public health orders.
Vancouver police say they issued multiple warnings and fines to the man before arresting him on Dec. 25 and charging him under Section 99 of the provincial Public Health Act. He was released on Boxing Day.
The City of Toronto is taking a harder stand against residents who illegally use city ice rinks.
Emergency management head Matthew Pegg cautioned Wednesday that paid-duty police and municipal security officers will beef up patrols at the city’s 54 outdoor skating rinks.
The 1918 Spanish flu was a killer of historic proportions.
In 1918 and 1919, the novel H1N1 “Spanish flu” virus killed between 50 million and 100 million people—as much as 5 percent of the world’s population—mostly within a few months, making the contemporaneous mass murder of World War I look like a bagatelle. The pandemic was, Laura Spinney writes in her book Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, “the greatest tidal wave of death since the Black Death, perhaps in the whole of human history.”
When your refrigerator goes out under quarantine and your supplies begin to rot, do you really need another rant from Maxine Waters?
In all the gloom and doom, and media-driven nihilism, there is actually an array of good news. As many predicted, as testing spreads, and we get a better idea of the actual number and nature of cases, the death rate from coronavirus slowly but also seems to steadily decline.
Two things can be true at the same time about COVID-19.
For one, people can take the virus seriously, believe it’s an issue, and believe everyone needs to take the necessary precautions in order to limit the spread of the virus or avoid it altogether.
On the other end, the same person who takes the COVID-19 virus seriously can also be a person who recognizes that a societal collapse could do far more damage to the people than this virus can, and do what’s necessary to keep society afloat by living out their lives as normally as possible.
A florist in Alberta has done the unthinkable: she has kept her business open every single day in defiance of lockdown orders imposed.
Premier Doug Ford said he should have told finance minister Rod Phillips to return back to Ontario when he found out the minister travelled out of the country for a holiday vacation.
Ford made the comments Wednesday afternoon during a visit to Trillium Health where health officials are preparing to distribute the newly arrived Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to Peel Public Health.
