Ford Confirms Ontario Has 36 Cases Of The B.1.617 Variant First Found In India

"I'm pleading with the federal government to stop all non-essential travel to Canada."

Ford Confirms Ontario Has 36 Cases Of The B.1.617 Variant First Found In India
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Premier Doug Ford announced that as of Friday, April 23, there were 36 confirmed B.1.617 cases in Ontario.

Ford suggested that international travel is driving cases of this variant, which was first detected in India and has since been reported in provinces including British Columbia and Quebec.

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"These new variants didn't swim here," he tweeted. "I'm pleading with the federal government to stop all non-essential travel to Canada before new variants overwhelm our ICU's completely."

On Thursday, April 22, Canada banned all flights arriving from Pakistan and India for a duration of 30 days. Now, Ford has demanded even tighter restrictions and said repeatedly that the measures taken to secure Canada's borders have not been enough.

Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown echoed Ford's statement. "Stop all leisure air travel internationally and domestically," he tweeted on Friday. "The result of loose rules at the airport is more and more dangerous [with] variants."

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  • Abby Neufeld
    Abby Neufeld was a writer at Narcity Canada. She received her Bachelor of Arts in English and Professional Communications at the University of Victoria. Her past work has been published in The Toronto Star, Bitch Media, Canadian Dimension, This Magazine, and more. In 2019, Abby co-founded The New Twenties, an environmentally-focused literary and arts magazine.

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