Raidah Fairooz:-Premier Doug Ford took the initiative to aim at COVID-19 quarantine measures in Canada’s land border alongside the United States on Friday, as Ontario reported 3,887 new COVID-19 cases and 21 deaths. “We can’t take anything for granted right now, we need to be more vigilant than ever,” he told reporters.
On Thursday, CBC News reported that a letter was sent from Ford’s government to the federal government, regarding quarantine measures. Ford argued that not enough effective measures were being taken in order to prevent the dangerous variants from Canada, “as long as these massive loopholes exist we’re not safe from new variants and I will not let this issue go,” Ford said. However, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who spoke to the reporters at the same time as Ford, did not quite agree with Ford’s statement and promised to continue working with the province.
Trudeau’s suspension of 95% of travel to Canada, has been declared for more than a year now. Regardless, Trudeau stated that a limited number of exceptional cases like essential workers, permanent citizens, or Canadians returning home can be made when crossing from the United States in particular. He states the reason they do not have to quarantine in a hotel, has to deal with the state of affairs of their arrival. “There is a fundamental difference between someone arriving on connecting flights from anywhere around the world at the airport,” he said.
As of this Friday, there have been 1,331 new cases in Toronto. Additionally, as of this Thursday at 8 p.m., the province says that it has managed to acquire 5,139,984 doses of vaccine. Ford declared that the province has successfully achieved its goal of giving 40% of the adult population at least one of the vaccine doses. Ford’s news conference announcement states that it’s planning on broadening COVID-19 vaccine eligibility to all the adults within a span of a month, and all the Ontarians over the age of 18 will be eligible to start making appointments on the call center and booking portal starting from the week of May 24th. In addition, education workers around the province will also be able to book a vaccine appointment starting from May 3rd.
Source: CBC
