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My COVID Story: How have you been impacted by coronavirus?
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Hinshaw provides brief Christmas Eve update
Limited data released by the province on Thursday showed another 1,100 cases of COVID-19 have been identified.
Over the past 24 hours, about 15,600 tests were completed, indicating a positivity rate of about seven per cent.
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Locked in a cell all but a few minutes a day, Wayne Wilcox has to improvise to pass the time.
“There’s a table that’s in my cell,” said Wilcox, an inmate at the Edmonton Remand Centre. “I drew a chessboard on there. Me and my cellmate play chess once in awhile.” With no access to game sets, he molded his own pieces using toilet paper and toothpaste.
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Try refreshing your browser. Boredom, isolation and illness as COVID-19 s second wave batters Alberta prisons and jails Back to video
“It took a while to make, but we’ve got nothing but time.”
Wilcox knows how to do time. The inmate at the centre of a landmark Alberta habeas corpus case, Wilcox previously spent nearly two years in solitary confinement at the remand.
Nevertheless, Wilcox says he and his fellow inmates locked down around the clock to try to contain the jail’s COVID outbreak are struggling.
“You can see it, it’s causing issues for people,” said Wilcox. “Like, one day they’ll be they’ll be happy-go-lucky, going around talking to people as much as you can, anyway. And then even later that day, all of a sudden, they just switch, now they’re just mad.”
“It took a while to make, but we’ve got nothing but time.”
Wilcox knows how to do time. The inmate at the centre of a landmark Alberta habeas corpus case, Wilcox previously spent nearly two years in solitary confinement at the remand.
Nevertheless, Wilcox says he and his fellow inmates locked down around the clock to try to contain the jail’s COVID outbreak are struggling.
“You can see it, it’s causing issues for people,” said Wilcox. “Like, one day they’ll be they’ll be happy-go-lucky, going around talking to people as much as you can, anyway. And then even later that day, all of a sudden, they just switch, now they’re just mad.”
More delays in fatal collision case
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The COVID pandemic is making it difficult for a lawyer to meet with a client, who is charged in connection with a fatal car collision last year. The lawyer told a judge Thursday in Lethbridge provincial court, the pandemic has prevented him from visiting Wesley Brian Phillips at the Calgary Correctional Centre. That has made it difficult to review disclosure about the case with his client. During a hearing Oct. 15 the accused’s lawyer was granted an adjournment to give him time to review disclosure. When the matter returned to court Nov. 19, defence requested more time to review disclosure and it was adjourned to Thursday’s hearing. The case has been adjourned again and returns to court early in the new year.