Thread by @BarbLarochelle

Ready for the lie-a-thon?

There are 62,733 confirmed cases. Highest ever and only a fraction of the actual spread, says Kenney.

We’re all eligible for 2 kits every two weeks—anyone with an Alberta Health Card. So where are they? Why did O&G people get dozens of those????

Kenney says there have been ‘delivery delays’ but 1 million arrived on an airplane last night. He is blaming the federal government. Still no word on the millions of missing tests that were already in Alberta.

He claims schools have received 58% of the initial supply of tests. I know no one who got them, personally.

“Thank you to parents and everyone in the education system who worked so hard to receive students back into the classroom this week” says Kenney. It’s best for their overall health and well-being, Kenney says. Everyone agrees, he says. Yeah—but SAFELY!!

Kenney says when the world looks back on the covid era, he thinks it will be clear that one of the worse mistakes was school closures. He is full of it, BTW.

Now he is talking about the ‘medical grade’ masks that schools are receiving. The masks are garbage. Why not N95? He also talks about cohorting and hand sanitation. For an airborne virus (he doesn’t mention the airborne part).

He says there are some ‘operational challenges right now’ and that the extended winter break last year ‘served the education system well’. How did it do that?

2 schools have requested and been allowed to go online since yesterday. He is thanking substitute teachers. I reject his gratitude.

Kenney is giving vaccination stats. Different countries have had different outcomes with omicron, he says. We know that hospitalizations will continue to grow in the coming weeks. Shorter stays and fewer ICU admissions, he says.

Kenney puts on a blue mask. He’s not wearing the N95 he wore to hand out sandwiches and to get a booster shot!

Hinshaw is talking about a change in ‘outbreak reporting’. Surprise, they are ‘no longer able to report on other outbreaks’ other than long term care. Perfect track record of reducing measures and increasing nothing.

6010 new cases of covid at 40.9% positivity. 8 new deaths. Hospitalizations up as well.

She is making excuses for why they are reporting less and giving us less information. And that the delay in rapid test shipments is ‘disappointing’. They are now including anyone who is pregnant for PCR testing though.

You can use online resources instead of being able to get any sort of test! Fantastic 🙄! But call volumes are very high at 811 right now. If your kid has any symptoms, assume it’s omicron.

They are still expecting to see more hospitalizations than ever. She encourages people to wear masks and review the masking info.! So helpful!

Hinshaw says surgical masks are better than cloth masks, if you have access to them. She says the ‘available evidence does not warrant’ using N95 masks in ‘day to day life’. But are they better? Are they? Because this feels like more gaslighting.

Question about changes to PCR tests: if her recommendations are based on data, but if the data is significantly skewed because few people can be tested, what are her recommendations based on? She says things like positivity rate and wastewater samples don’t change.

Someone ask her why they are testing 10,000 fewer people per day than what we have been able to do? Why are we not able to now when we were able to before?

Follow-up asking about Quebec’s proposed unvaccinated tax. Kenney says he’s ‘very concerned’ that the federal government did not outright denounce it. Then he pontificates about the Canada Health Act. Who knew that he respects it?

Kenney says that it’s a moral obligation that we have not to ‘pick and choose who gets care based on their financial ability’. And that’s inhumane, unethical, and un-Canadian. 🙄

He likens this to charging people who are overweight or drunk drivers. Except that being overweight isn’t contagious, and drunk drivers DO have to pay more for insurance or lose their licence.

Question about how soon should someone receive a booster shot if they just had omicron. Hinshaw says once they have no symptoms and are feeling better, they can get their booster. They have to weigh in their other risk factors.

Follow-up, wastewater data is showing that this is on a downward move? Has the wave peaked? Hinshaw says it’s too early to say that. In any wave we see half of the cases in the the second half of the wave.

Kenney is lying about in-school vaccination clinics, saying that they had low uptake. That was when they offered this to high school students who were MONTHS past having been eligible for their 2nd dose already.

Kenney says ‘parents want to be with their children’. Probably some do. But thousands of kids get vaccinated for other things at school every year with no problem.

Question about absences at schools this week. Shockingly, Hinshaw does not have that data, and neither does Kenney! Because they don’t care. Kenney says it’s ‘probably hard to get real time data’. Kenney says LaGrange told him this school re-entry has gone more smoothly than in

any other previous school re-entries in the covid era.

Licia Corbella is asking about the new traffic court laws and about Quebec’s anti-vax tax. She says he’s contradicting himself because on the one hand he says they won’t tax people who can’t afford to pay, but on the other hand they all have to pay these tickets, and no way out.

My own note: who thinks people UCP doesn’t like will get targeted for tickets now? Tickets that can’t be challenged.

Julia Wong asks for clarification about what 58% of schools getting rapid tests actually means? Kenney says he knows, anecdotally, that a lot of schools have been covered. Kenney blames Health Canada for not approving more kinds of tests.

She persists—does 50% mean that all schools got half, or half of the schools got all, and other schools got none. Kenney says ‘That’s possible.’

Breanna Karstens-Smith asks when will people in general be able to get rapid tests in pharmacies again? Later this month, Kenney says. He says that some are still available for purchase.