Americans have been able to return to the US. Canadians who are living in the US can come back to Canada anytime. In other words, the US is remaining closed to non-citizens travelling for non essential reasons.
By land. By air, in any practical sense that it matters, anyone can go. I’ve known people who went to Disney World or Vegas.
Yes, I keep forgetting to specify that.
The policy seems weird to me. I don’t understand why folks who travel by air are deemed an acceptable risk, while those who travel by car are not.
But It’s their policy and they are welcome to do what they like.
I am amused by the comments section in the National Post, where readers are all blaming Trudeau for the decisions of the United States.
It’s a better class of people that can afford to travel by air, none of those damn dirty hippies in their VW busses.
These are the same people that are still blaming Trudeau for our horrible showing in the vaccine rollout. If they could someone also blame his dad, they’d be even happier. At our current pace we will surpass Israel in 4 days and be in the vaccination lead among all countries larger than the small island nations.
The still have not pivoted from the main policy platform plank from the conservative party during the last election:
“We hate Trudeau and so should you”
That seemed to be their primary messaging.
Not quite. In addition to the smattering of small island nations ahead of Israel in doses/capita, there are also UAE, Bahrain, Uruguay, and Chile. Bahrain is pretty small, but UAE is 10 million people. Also, Qatar is currently ahead of us and behind Israel, but on current trends will pass Israel before we do. Chile and Uruguay may be using mostly Chinese vaccines, but deserve credit for securing and distributing vaccines at rates only matched by much wealthier nations.
Criticism of Canada’s vaccine program has always been stupid. We were very slightly behind most of continental Europe through February and March, and have otherwise outperformed all peer nations aside from the US and UK.
Yep. The only reason we ever had a problem at all was because every single supplier ended up shorting us early in the process. And there’s no way any government could have predicted that, or done anything about it, either. Given that we have no in-country facilities to produce these vaccines, no matter who was PM, we’d have been in the same boat, or even worse.
Agreed. Much of the critiques seemed to be along the lines of “Why didn’t Trudeau start a pharmaceutical and vaccine production company from scratch in 3 months and produce a magical vaccine that was better than all the others in the world? It’s his fault that we stopped working in this area decades ago!”
It wasn’t about the vaccines. It was about finding another stick to hit Trudeau with. Some folks simply hate him with an unreasoning passion.
I thought that having the federal government in charge of procurement and the provinces in charge of delivery was a good idea. I also liked the involvement of the military in distribution - they had the resources and manpower. Finally, I thought it was a good idea to order vaccines from many different companies, even before we knew what their efficacy or timeline for delivery would be like. Not putting all of our eggs in one basket was the right thing to do IMO.
You are correct on this. For some reason the daily feed I read does not have these listed.
I follow this stuff on Coronavirus (COVID-19) Vaccinations - Our World in Data
We’re actually in 22nd place worldwide on their chart, though aside from the 5 I mentioned above plus Israel, the rest really are tiny islands (well, Gibraltar and San Marino aren’t islands except metaphorically, but they are tiny) and 7 aren’t even independent states. I guess you could argue that Malta and Iceland rate above tiny, but combined they’re about the population of Winnipeg, so…
That might be true in some other context, but medical supplies are a special case. There are lots of critical supplies: nearly everything is critical to one patient or another, and lots of medicines are limited to a small number of certified suppliers. At any time, there may be one or another medicine that is overpriced or in short supply because of supply chain or licencing problems.
So it’s an example where any government could have predicted there would be supply problems in a pandemic – a world-wide international epidemic. It’s not clear that the Canadian government could have done anything about it, other than good political messaging, even if they had predicted it.
I think the problem was the reverse. Governments predicted that there wouldn’t be vaccines available until about now, and that they would be in short supply, and that there wasn’t any point in trying to be the monster that grabbed all the available vaccine supplies. They didn’t predict that there would be a lot of vaccine available now, and a lot of vaccinated people, and that Canada would be compared to countries with more vaccination: they predicted that the situation would be much worse, and that Canada would be compared to countries in much worse shape.
Well, I suspect that the folks in Ottawa did predict this, and that’s why they ordered a lot of vaccines from many different suppliers, rather than relying on one single supplier.
We even had a partnership between the National Research Council of Canada and CanSino Biologics early last year. Good thing we did not count on this one, because the deal to do the first Canadian clinical trials with CanSino’s vaccine (Ad5-nCoV) was shelved because of China having a political hissy fit.
Yes, it was entirely predictable that one or more of the suppliers we contracted with would fail to deliver the vaccines on time. I mean, to begin with, we started ordering them before we even knew if they’d be safe and effective. And sure, you might expect some to have supply problems, slowing down their production. And some might decide to prioritize other customers over Canada.
What came as a surprise was that every single supplier ended up doing that. The whole point of buying from everyone who was even looking at vaccines in a funny way was to avoid just this sort of shortfall, which was incredibly likely with any one supplier, but should have been far less likely with all of them.
So, Alberta had decided to take a quick swerve back to normal. No mandatory isolation for positive Covid cases, reducing testing to severe symptoms only, no contact tracing. I get that we need to get back to normal eventually but it really seems a mistake to jump into this all at once. It seems a mistake to cut down on testing and contact tracing at the same time you remove quarantine requirements (first from contacts of positives and then from positive cases themselves). Seeing as hospitalizations are a trailing indicator I’d think it would be important to understand how much your policy changes are affecting transmission before the hospitals potentially are over run. This is especially true given Alberta has the 2nd worst vaccination rate in the country.
The monthly modeling should be coming out tomorrow. June’s was interesting in its possible trajectories based on increasing contacts.
I agree with this. Especially about testing. If the government wants me to exercise my own judgement on risk, fine. But they can damned well give us the information we need to make informed decisions. How am I supposed to know if something is safe to do without any information about the prevalence of the virus in the community? There are things I’m willing to do when there are only 500 cases out of 4.5 million people that I would never do if there are 50,000. I need to know, or we are stuck at home (my wife and son are both immuno-compromised).
Hospitalizations don’t cut it as a proxy any more, because most vaccinated people who get sick won’t be hospitalized, but they’ll still be out there infecting people.
Contact tracing I’m not sure about. It’s very useful in early stages when you have few cases and you need to find the spreaders, but by now Covid is pretty much endemic in the population and I’m not sure contact tracing is really feasible or useful.
I’m not sure why Ontario’s numbers on slide 14 look so flat but I’ll take it.
In Ontario our daily case count has shot up in the past week; the rolling seven-day average is at 306, up from 198 a week ago. Yesterday and today have leveled off a bit, but we’re still back at “June during the lockdown.” Positivity rate is levelling off as well, it was up above 2% but it’s still higher than it was two weeks ago.
Lest this veer off into the politics of it all…of course Doug Ford is taking a page out of the South of the 49th conservative politics, and has ruled out any kind of vaccine passport, despite the express wishes of the various business organizations and the mayor of Toronto, and he’s refusing to consider any kind of vaccine mandate, even for care home workers or teachers, great news for parents sending their kids back into the classrooms in three and a half weeks.
I was so hopeful a week ago. 
Our politicians in the larger provinces are showing a complete lack of spine. They’re afraid to do anything and afraid to do nothing. They seem to be paralyzed. My employer is currently playing “happy,happy, everyone back to work in September, everything is back to normal, please don’t look a the huge increase in cases, please be polite to those who choose to not vaccinate and spread sickness and disease.”
Pissing me off.
This is the plan for the universities in BC (and, I presume, K–12 schools). We’re four weeks away from the start of term, and so, I guess, about six weeks away from realizing how bad an idea the current (lack of) a plan is.