‘Can’t let guard down’ in virus fight: Ford
Premier says U.S. border should remain closed
TORONTO — Ontario Premier Doug Ford doesn’t want to see the Canada-United States border opened when the current closure expires July 21, considering the positive trends in the province compared to a COVID-19 resurgence in many states.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has extended a ban on non-essential travel between the two countries until at least that day, and Ford said even after that it seems too early.
“I know it’s inevitable, we’ve got to do it, I just don’t think we’re ready right now,” Ford said.
“You see what’s happening down in the states, you look at Florida, you look at Texas, Arizona, California — I don’t want to be those states.”
Several states set single-day COVID-19 case records this week, including Arizona, California, Mississippi, Nevada, Texas and Oklahoma.
Ontario, meanwhile, has recorded fewer than 200 new daily cases for 10 out of the past 12 days and with a growth rate of less than one per cent for almost three weeks.
“This isn’t over. I can’t stress it enough. We’re doing great because everyone listened,” Ford said.
“But man, this thing comes back, that’s what concerns me. So we have to stay focused and we can’t let our guard down for a heartbeat. We let our guard down and look what happened to Florida, look what happened to California and Arizona and Texas. That’s what happens when you’re reckless, you’re careless and you let your guard down.”
Ontario’s chief medical officer, Dr. David Williams, said some of the states with roughly the same population as Ontario are reporting more than 1,500 new daily cases. In Ontario, no day has seen an increase over 700.
“It says you cannot be casual about opening up,” he said.
“We’d like to get low enough to say with our methods, with our controls, with our protection, with our social circles, with our cohorting, we might even fend off a second wave.”
Ontario reported 189 new cases of COVID-19 Thursday, and 10 more deaths. That brings the province to a total of 34,205 cases, including 2,641 deaths and 29,528 resolved cases.
That’s an increase of 192 resolved cases over the previous day, continuing a trend of those growing more quickly than active cases.
The number of people in hospital with COVID-19 fell from 278 to 270.
The number of people in intensive care and on ventilators — 69 and 47, respectively — fell to the lowest levels since the province started publicly reporting those figures at the beginning of April.
A 20-year-old man was speeding when he crashed into and killed a mother and her three daughters, police alleged Thursday, just hours after the four family members were laid to rest.
Peel Regional Police allege Brady Robertson of Caledon, Ont., was driving at “a very high rate of speed” when he collided with a Volkswagen carrying Karolina Ciasullo, 37, and her daughters — Klara, 6, Lilianna, 3, and Mila, 1 — last Thursday.
Robertson faces four counts of dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing death, as well as one count of dangerous operation connected to an unrelated incident in Caledon two days earlier. He’s due in court for a bail hearing July 23.
Meanwhile, relatives of the Ciasullo family gathered at the St. Eugene de Mazenod Catholic church in Brampton, Ont., on Thursday to pay tribute to the four victims, whose deaths have sparked an outpouring of grief in the community.
In a tearful eulogy, Ciasullo’s sister-in-law said she would miss the hours the two spent on the phone, planning holidays together and catching up, as well as stealing hugs from her nieces and hearing their voices.
Those memories will “play like a movie in my mind forever,” Connie Ciasullo said, describing her sister-in-law as “the glue that held everything together.”
“Despite the pain and heartache we feel, we were blessed to have had these beautiful souls in our life,” she said, her voice breaking.
The service was closed to the public but was livestreamed, and audio was played on loudspeakers outside the building.
Photos shared on social media showed a crowd scattered outside the church, some standing and others sitting in folding chairs to listen to the memorial.
Inside, four white caskets were placed before the altar as mourners spread out in the pews in accordance with physical distancing guidelines, some wearing black face masks.
Ontario’s police watchdog is also looking into the fatal collision. The Special Investigations Unit has said a Peel Regional Police officer had “observed” one of the vehicles involved in the crash before the incident.
An online fundraiser had raised more than $390,000 for the family as of Thursday afternoon, with many donations coming in during the funeral service.
LANCASTER, PA. — Both U.S. President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, were swinging through key battleground states on Thursday, presenting duelling events in a way that hasn’t happened much in the age of coronavirus and showcased their contrasting styles in response to the pandemic.
The former vice-president wore a black mask as he met with three mothers and two children who told of benefiting from the Obama administration’s signature health care law in Lancaster, Pa., and then giving a speech on how he would improve broader access to health insurance. That comes as Biden has spent weeks arguing that the pandemic remains a clear and present danger that Trump is trying to wish away amid a desire to jump-start a crippled economy.
Trump visited Marinette in rural Wisconsin for a private tour of a shipyard and participated in a town hall broadcast by Fox News Channel from an airport in Green Bay. VicePresident Mike Pence is also travelling in another potential swing state, Ohio.
Biden is planning to use his latest speech to argue that Trump’s opposition to the health care law, coupled with a response to the pandemic that he calls inadequate, ensures that even people who contract the coronavirus and survive will “live their lives caught in a vise between Donald Trump’s twin legacies.”
Those are “his failure to protect the American people from the coronavirus and his heartless crusade to take health care protections away from American families,” the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee will say, according to excerpts released by his campaign. Biden also plans to scoff at Trump’s comment that more testing for the virus is “a double-edged sword.”
“Testing unequivocally saves lives, and widespread testing is the key to opening up our economy again — so that’s one edge of the sword,” Biden will say. “The other edge: that he thinks finding out that more Americans are sick will make him look bad. And that’s what he’s worried about. He’s worried about looking bad.”
That’s a reference to Trump saying on Saturday that he’d instructed aides to “slow down testing” because more screening was turning up too many positive tests. The White House first said Trump was joking, but the president later insisted that he was not.
Narrow 2016 victories in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania were pivotal in sending Trump to the White House. That he’d build his travel around trying to do that again — and that Biden would respond with trips meant to flip the states back to Democratic — wouldn’t usually be a surprise with the presidential election now less than five months away. But the coronavirus has so upended the presidential campaign that normal schedules and travel have been virtually frozen since March.
After long focusing on staging virtual rallies and other online appearances from his Delaware home, Biden has in recent weeks begun making frequent trips to Pennsylvania, allowing him to focus on a key swing state without venturing far.
Trump, by contrast, staged a rally in Tulsa, Okla., last weekend and spoke at a megachurch in Arizona on Tuesday after touring a section of that state’s border with Mexico. Biden’s team has been careful to organize very small events and enforce social distancing while its members and its candidate wear masks. Trump’s campaign says Biden is using that cautious approach to hide the fact that he can’t draw large, enthusiastic crowds.