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Canada’s governments lift COVID-19 restrictions despite warnings of deadly third wave
Highlighting “the emergence and spread” of more contagious variants of the COVID-19 virus, Canada’s chief medical officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, told a press conference last Friday, “Unless we maintain and abide by stringent public health measures, we may not be able to avert a re-acceleration of the epidemic in Canada. These variants have been smouldering in the background and now threaten to flare up.”
Tam backed up her warnings with Health Canada projections that showed new infections could rise to 10,000 per day by late March if current public health restrictions are maintained, and mushroom to 20,000 if these restrictions are relaxed. “Further lifting of the public health measures would cause the epidemic to re-surge rapidly and strongly,” she declared.
How will Ontario schools keep kids safe during the third wave?
With schools in the province reopened, many conflicted parents are wondering what improvements if any have been made. Aaron Hutchins
It was sometime in August 2020, before the
last reopening of schools in Ontario, that Sarah Liss became fixated with ventilation. Her older child goes to school in the Toronto District School Board, in the kind of building where students complain about the sweltering heat on warmer days. Only now she was worried about COVID.
With school boards and the province focusing on
masks, cohorting and cleaning, Liss used her spare time researching another vital factor identified by health and science experts for slowing transmission: ventilation. Specifically, she began looking for solutions to get air purifiers into classrooms not only across the city, but the entire province.
We have featured him in The Tyee because he has grasped realities our political leaders haven’t.
“Success in a pandemic is not waiting for a vaccine,” says Bar-Yam. “It’s about using an arsenal of tools, including vaccines, to defeat the virus while we have the chance.”
Going to zero therefore means a serious five to seven-week lockdown that brings numbers down exponentially.
It means financially supporting struggling small businesses and their workers during that lockdown.
It means changing our testing programs from passive systems that wait for symptomatic citizens to show up, to an active approach that brings tests to the most at-risk communities and workplaces.