In an acknowledgement of how dangerous this third wave has become, causing Ontario’s Intensive Care Units to overflow with younger COVID patients who are getting sicker faster, the Province this week imposed a new Stay At Home order.

The Government also announced a faster and more urgent vaccination rollout as vaccines become more plentiful. (See vaccination article below).

This week’s daily Toronto case numbers hovered around 1000, triple the number from just a few weeks ago. Today they jumped above 1300, as the number hospitalized in our …

A new lockdown is here – an “emergency brake” response when a well-planned approach to a highly visible danger would have done a far better job.

We are now well into a third wave that will inevitably get worse. Because it typically takes about two weeks for virus spread to show up as cases, and even longer until those cause spikes in hospitalizations and admissions to Intensive Care Units, actions taken today are too late to have any impact on the disaster facing us the first …

The rain had ended and food vendors were preparing for a beautiful summer evening in Mel Lastman Square when my optimism was broken by a weather report: “It’s going to be storming again in about 20 minutes.”

I rushed out to warn the vendors. But because it was neither what they were witnessing nor what they wanted to hear, most disregarded the news – until the bad weather arrived on schedule, sending everyone scrambling for cover.

Welcome to the pandemic’s third wave, accompanied by the end of …

Amid ongoing confusion and missing information, Ontario residents over 60 living independently at last have some news on when they can realistically expect to be vaccinated.

All residents of long-term care homes and retirement homes in Toronto should already have received both vaccine doses. For others aged 60 and up, the Province announced the following schedule:

March 15: By this date, a provincial website will open to schedule vaccinations for residents over 80 living independently.  Shots will start being administered about a week later.
April 15: ages 75 …

Despite declining COVID numbers across Ontario and, to a lesser extent, in Toronto, we’re entering a time of greater danger.

As most of us know by now, the UK variant already spreading through the population is expected to be the dominant form of the virus by next month.  A random screening this week found that more than 5% of new cases in Ontario were the more transmissible UK variant, many of them from an outbreak in Simcoe Muskoka.

Variants originating in South Africa and Brazil, though currently …

If all one looked at were this week’s trends, it would be easy to think we’d turned a corner and were on our way home. For the second straight week, new infections in Toronto fell, as did numbers in Ontario and across North America.

In the city, we averaged about 600 new cases per day – still terribly high but moving in the right direction. Hospitalizations and ICU occupancy were down slightly. And the reproductive number dropped to .8, which should cause numbers to keep falling.

With …

In some cultures, caring for the elders is both an obligation and an honour.

And then there’s us. I’m supposing that the neglect that has caused thousands to die and many more to suffer in our homes for the aged is unintentional, because we’re not that mean. It’s more like we’re …well…you know…kind of busy with other things.

Individually, we care about our aging parents and grandparents. But as a society – and for people we don’t know – not so much.

When the Government of Ontario quietly …