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Are our borders COVID-19 secured?

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No matter how vigorously restaurants and gyms maintain COVID-19 safety protocols; they can’t control people arriving in Canada from outside our borders.

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That raises the question of how effectively the federal government has managed this issue, given a report by The Canadian Press that since Canada “closed” its borders last March, less than a quarter of the 4.6 million people arriving here have been quarantined.

The rest were deemed “essential” and exempted, asked to wear masks when they can’t physically distance from others and, for medical workers, not to treat people over the age of 65 for 14 days.

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International flights coming into Canada with COVID-19 infected passengers continue daily at the four airports designated to receive them — Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver.

Almost a thousand domestic and international flights had COVID-19 infected passengers between February and early September.

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Toronto’s airport receives the most flights with COVID-19 infected passengers, including more than two-dozen incidents from Oct. 5-19 alone.

The feds assure say they have everything under control, that air travel is down over 90 per cent from pre-pandemic levels and that many essential exemptions are for truck drivers, airline crews, medical professionals and the military.

Based on data covering 80 per cent of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Canada, Ottawa says only 4.4 per cent involve recent travellers or people coming into close contact with them.

But Toronto public health said recently it’s no longer doing contact tracing for community spread in Canada’s largest city, because it’s been overwhelmed by testing requests.

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It now only does contact tracing in institutional settings such as schools, hospitals and long-term care homes.

Beyond that, how confident should we be about federal government COVID-19 data?

A government that told us for months that border closures wouldn’t work and that it had everything under control, up to the moment in mid-March it suddenly reversed course and begin invoking measures it specifically said were ineffective days before.

In another reversal, rapid medical testing for COVID-19 leading to shorter quarantines — another area Canada was slow to react to, claiming it wasn’t accurate enough — has now been introduced on a trial basis for Calgary’s airport.

That’s good, but why not for Toronto’s airport too, where most infections occur?

–Postmedia News

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