Trudeau frustrated by holiday travellers
VACCINATION RATE LAGGING BEHIND
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed his frustration Tuesday as signs pointed to the COVID-19 pandemic taking a dark turn in Canada.
In London, Ont., the morgue was at capacity, a field hospital was opened in Burlington, Ont., and Quebec officials were mulling a near-total lockdown as cases continued to rise at an accelerated pace.
Canada’s chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam noted in an Ottawa new conference that earlier in the pandemic, it took five months for Canada to hit 500,000 cases. But now, it is taking just two weeks for 100,000 new cases to emerge.
“This ever-more-rapid accumulation of cases will continue until we can make significant progress in interrupting spread, which is why we must all continue our efforts,” she said.
While officials said upwards of a million doses of COVID-19 vaccines will arrive by month’s end, the rate at which Canadians are being vaccinated appears to be lagging behind some other countries.
One open-source effort to track vaccinations suggests only 35 per cent of the doses that have arrived in Canada so far have been administered, amounting to 0.394 per cent of the population receiving a shot so far.
In the U.K., over a million doses have already been given, and in Israel, 12 per cent of the population has already received a first dose.
What more the federal government could do to help provinces roll out vaccines faster is expected to be on the agenda at a meeting between Trudeau and his provincial and territorial counterparts Thursday.
“I think all Canadians, including me, are frustrated to see vaccines in freezers and not in people’s arms,” Trudeau said.
Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin, who is overseeing vaccine distribution, said efforts continue to reinforce the infrastructure required to store and transport vaccines, as well as expand distribution networks.
“I want to reaffirm to all Canadians that while quantities seem limited, we are scaling up,” he said.
“This is a deliberate operation.”
As vaccines arrive in Canada, they are transferred to the provinces, which have control over administering the shots to individual recipients.
“It defies any comprehension that this premier’s office, led by a chief of staff who was out of country, apparently unbeknownst to his boss, which I don’t believe, would think when you are going to undertake probably the most important health and economic response effort in a century, with a minister who plays a key role, who is holidaying for a month.”
Phillips says just because Premier Kenney accepted Allard’s resignation on Monday, fired his chief of staff, and demoted several of his MLAs after four days of dithering on the issue that this should in any way let the premier off the hook for these monumental lapses.
“The premier doesn’t even know where his chief of staff is? No wonder the pandemic management is being botched, and we are now seeing some really concerning trends on vaccine rollout,” she says. “It should not be lost on Albertans it took Mr. Kenney three or four days after people spoke out against his very terrible and regrettable news conference on Friday where he suggested these people travelling abroad were encouraged by him, and there was really nothing wrong with what these folks had done, because he hadn’t told them not to. This was a significant lapse in judgement.”
Lethbridge-East MLA Nathan Neudorf acknowledges the anger many have expressed toward his party since the travel revelations came out, particularly among those who have sacrificed and suffered because they followed the province’s public health regulations.
“We have to do better,” he states. “That’s the bottom line. We have all kinds of new restrictions, bylaws and advisories and all that. We have to make those more clear. One way we can do that is by lifting them if we continue to see the COVID numbers drop. Another way is to get as many vaccines out as quickly, safely and efficiently as possible. There is work to do.
“One of my favourite sayings by C.S. Lewis is you can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending. I think that is something we
Nova Scotia rolled out its plan Tuesday, saying it intends to make the vaccine available to 75 per cent of the eligible population by the end of September, and focus on highpriority populations over the next four months.
In Ontario, provincial authorities promised all long-term-care residents, workers and essential caregivers in COVID-19 hot spots will be vaccinated by Jan. 21 and vaccinations in Ontario’s Indigenous communities will begin later this week.
In Quebec a total of 32,763 vaccines have been administered so far. A rising daily case count — more than 2,500 new diagnoses a day for the last several days — has officials mulling a nearly complete shutdown of the province, including schools, and imposing a curfew, some reports said.
While Canadians await the sharp sting of the needle, many are also feeling the sharp sting of watching their friends and neighbours returning from holiday vacations abroad and potentially accessing