Ford differentiates between Ontarians holding-private gatherings and establishments defying COVID-19 rules

Ford differentiates between Ontarians holding private gatherings and establishments defying COVID-19 rules

Tuesday’s total case count of 1,009 cases artificially low due to data error

Premier Doug Ford drew a distinction between Ontarians flouting public health measures through private gatherings and establishments that openly defy the province’s COVID-19 rules Tuesday.

The remarks came in response to questions about at Toronto barbeque restaurant owner publicly vowing to keep his doors open amid the province’s lockdown for the city.

“They have to follow the rules. There can’t be rules for one group and not another,” he said at a news conference Tuesday, less forcefully than in other instances where the premier has come out swinging against people throwing large parties or weddings, for example. https://steemit.com/news/@moonhd/news-ford-differentiates-between-ontarians-holding-private-gatherings-and-establishments-defying-covid-19-rules

“When it comes to private parties, that’s a different ball of wax,” Ford said. “I’m not going to get up here and start pounding the small business owner when the guy’s holding on by his finger nails. I differentiate between someone at home being reckless and having 100 people over and partying and renting a public storage place … that’s reckless.

“I don’t condone that he opened up but I feel terrible. My heart breaks for these guys … these business-owners, believe me. “But please, in saying all that, you’ve got to follow the protocols and guidelines.”

WATCH | Ford comments on Toronto BBQ restaurant vowing to stay open during COVID-19 lockdown:

Defiant owner should close BBQ restaurant, says Ontario premier

Ontario Premier Doug Ford says the owner of a Toronto BBQ restaurant who opened for indoor dining in violation of provincial lockdown orders should follow the rules, and he says his ‘heart breaks’ for small business. 1:12

The restaurant was eventually ordered to shut down by the City of Toronto after bylaw officers, public health inspectors and police were called to the site, city officials said in a statement.

Rapid testing begins, auditor general set to release report

The province also announced Tuesday that it has begun deploying rapid testing in long-term care homes, rural and remote areas — something the premier called a “gamechanger.”

The rapid tests, which can produce results in minutes rather than days, have been sent to 36 long-term care homes and 27 retirement homes, as well as some hospitals.

The testing kits are earmarked for a total of 22 hospitals, including two that are already using them, as well as remote
communities and some outbreak areas in hot-spot regions, the government said.

Some will also be sent to corporations such as Air Canada and Ontario Power Generation, while others will be used over several months in a pilot project involving private, public and non-profit sector employers to gauge the value of antigen testing on asymptomatic workers, the province said.

Ottawa began shipping the testing kits to the provinces late last month, but figuring out how to best put them to use has taken some time, and most jurisdictions are also verifying the results of rapid tests with a lab-based test.

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The “gold-standard” COVID-19 tests need to be processed in a lab, which can take at least a day. Rapid tests can yield results right where the patient is tested but are generally considered less reliable than lab-based tests.

One type of rapid test looks for the genetic material of the novel coronavirus, as does the traditional lab version. The other looks for the specific markers the virus leaves on the outside of a cell, known as antigens.

Ford said the province will continue to deploy the 98,000 ID Now tests and 1.2 million Panbio tests it has received from the federal government in the coming weeks. Health Minister Christine Elliott says another 1.5 million Panbio tests are expected to arrive in Ontario next month.

The announcement comes as a data error resulted in an artificially low daily total of 1,009 new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday.

It also comes just one day before the province’s auditor general is set to issue a three-part report on the province’s pandemic emergency preparedness and its response to COVID-19, including lab testing, case management and contact tracing.

A spokesperson for Health Minister Christine Elliott said that yesterday’s figure of 1,589 cases (which appeared to be a record high) inadvertently included eight-and-a-half extra hours worth of data from Nov. 22, meaning the total count was inflated. Today’s number adjusts for the mistake.

The new cases include 497 in Toronto, 175 in Peel Region and 118 in York Region. The seven-day average now sits at 1,395.

Other public health units that saw double-digit increases were:

Waterloo Region: 40
Windsor: 31
Simcoe Muskoka: 25
Ottawa: 19
Niagara Region: 19
Durham Region: 16
Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph: 16
Hamilton: 10
Thunder Bay: 14

[Note: All of the figures used in this story are found on the Ministry of Health’s COVID-19 dashboard or in its Daily Epidemiologic Summary. The number of cases for any region may differ from what is reported by the local public health unit, because local units report figures at different times.]

Testing falls to about half of capacity

Today’s additional cases include 270 that are school-related: 223 students and 47 staff. The Ministry of Education said in a statement that the figure is not a one-day increase. Rather it reflects cases identified in schools from 2 p.m. last Friday to 2 p.m. yesterday, and also some others that were not reported Friday because of professional learning days in some boards, including the Toronto public and Catholic boards.

There are currently 703 publicly-funded schools in Ontario, or about 14.6 per cent, with at least one reported instance of COVID-19. Four schools are closed due to the illness, including one in Windsor with 39 cases, the largest school-related outbreak in the province.

There are now 12,917 confirmed, active cases of the illness provincewide, a slight drop from yesterday as 1,082 cases were marked resolved today.

The further infections in today’s update come as Ontario’s network of labs processed just 27,053 test samples for the novel coronavirus, and added 29,316 to the queue to be completed. There is currently capacity in the system for up to 50,000 tests daily. Meanwhile, the province reported a test positivity rate of 5.8 per cent.

The official COVID-19 death toll grew by 14, up to 3,519. So far this month, 374 people with COVID-19 have died in Ontario.

Hospitalizations of people with COVID-19 also jumped, up 27 to 534. Of those, 159 are being treated in intensive care and 91 with ventilators. Public health officials have identified 150 patients in ICUs as the threshold for when unrelated surgeries and procedures are likely to be postponed because of burdens on the hospital system.

Meanwhile, a group of engineers, physicians and other professionals issued an open letter to the province Tuesday, calling for updated COVID-19 guidelines that emphasize the importance of ventilation when it comes to curbing the risk of spreading the virus

‘With winter approaching, our activities are moving indoors and it is therefore imperative that public institutions, workplaces and individuals understand the risk of aerosol transmission as well as the actions that can be taken to combat it,” the letter says.

Backed by 36 professionals, it also calls on the province to mandate and fund ventilation assessments and upgrades of settings like schools and long-term care homes, establishing ventilation standards for reopening, among other measures.

Trudeau warns COVID-19 vaccine will come later to Canada than other countries

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canadians won’t be front of the line when COVID-19 vaccines become available, because the first doses will be made outside of our borders.

“One of the things to remember is Canada no longer has any domestic production capacity for vaccines,” Trudeau said outside Rideau Cottage Tuesday. “Countries like the United States, Germany and the U.K. do have domestic pharmaceutical facilities which is why they’re obviously going to prioritize helping their citizens first.”

Trudeau warns COVID-19 vaccine will come later to Canada than other countries

Trudeau said Canada’s doses would follow shortly after, and he expects to see them in the first quarter of next year. But he said the first doses from the assembly line will go to the countries where the vaccine is made.

With promising news from several vaccine manufacturers, in recent weeks officials in those countries have said their citizenry could start receiving vaccines as early as December.

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Trudeau said Canadians should expect to receive doses shortly after that point, but without a domestic manufacturing capacity, which the country hasn’t had for decades, there will be a delay.

He said that is why the government bought doses of so many potentially successful vaccines, and why it is reinvesting in domestic manufacturing.

“We have done everything we can to ensure that Canadians get these vaccines as quickly as possible and as effectively as possible.”

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole said Trudeau’s delays will mean more hardship for Canadians.

“The prime minister told the House that Canadians would be first in line to receive the vaccine, but today he admitted we are going to be behind many countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany,” he said in the House of Commons. “How many more months will it take to flatten the curve because this prime minister has been unable to secure a vaccine?”

The government hasn’t released any of the contracts with vaccine manufacturers to indicate precisely where Canada is in the order of distribution and has said only that the country should expect doses in the first quarter of 2021, assuming the vaccines are approved by Health Canada.

Conservative Health critic MP Michelle Rempel Garner said there is no reason why the government should have been caught off guard.

“The issue of domestic vaccine manufacturing supply was identified as an issue after the H1N1 pandemic,” she said. “This issue in and of itself should not have come as a surprise to the Prime Minister or to the Health Minister or to the Procurement Minister when looking at a COVID vaccine rollout plan.”

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Andrew Casey, president and CEO of Biotech Canada an industry association, said the prime minister is partially right, especially with the leading candidates.

“For two of the three vaccines that we now know about, the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines, those are mRNA vaccines, which there is no manufacturing for that in Canada,” he said. “In fact, it’s very limited around the world because it’s such a novel vaccine.”

Casey said there is plenty of manufacturing capacity in Canada for making vaccines, but it uses different types of technology and can’t be easily switched to something different.

“One type of vaccine is like making wine and the other one is like making coke. Yes, they’re both put in bottles, and you can drink them with straws, but they’re very different processes.”

He said the manufacturers in Canada also have other orders they are processing for the flu and for childhood vaccinations and couldn’t just scrap that production for COVID even if the technology was interchangeable. Given Canada’s limitations, Casey said, buying access to as many doses as possible from other countries was a good move.

Casey said for large pharmaceutical companies it will take more than just money to build facilities in Canada and the government will have to think about investments in research, drug pricing and regulations structures and other issues.

“You have to then start to think about your policy, your public policy environment for those companies in a more holistic way.”

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Early in the pandemic, the government invested in two separate vaccine manufacturing facilities, one at the University of Saskatchewan’s VIDO-InterVac facility and another at a National Research Council facility in Montreal.

The Montreal facility received $44 million for upgrades and then another $126 million in August to build a manufacturing facility that will ultimately be able to produce millions of doses a month. The Saskatchewan facility received $12 million for its manufacturing capacity.

Dr. Paul Hodgson, associate director of the Saskatchewan facility, said they hope to have their manufacturing capacity ready late in 2021, but it is a complex process and bringing the equipment online takes time even once construction is complete.

“It’s not a situation right now where we can take technologies that other people have and use them and it’s unfortunate,” he said.

He said in hindsight it would have been ideal to get funding years ago, but that is not the situation the country is in. He said the Canada should definitely learn from this situation and be prepared for the next potential virus.

“What we’re realizing now is that from a supply chain issue, and production capacity issue, that having national supply or national manufacturers or the capacity to manufacture nationally is very important.”

Industry Minister Navdeep Bains said unfortunately there were no simple solutions when it came to increasing manufacturing.

“We need to recognize that building these complex bio-manufacturing facilities takes time,” he said.

At the start of the pandemic, Canada made virtually no personal protective equipment inside our borders. Bains said the government has worked to change that and will do the same with vaccines.

“Approximately 50 per cent of the investments that we’re making in procurement are made-in-Canada solutions. We have the same mindset when it comes to building up our domestic bio-manufacturing capabilities.”

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