Theresa Tam

Winter-weary Canadians eyeing a vacation were told to spike travel plans Friday as Ottawa cancelled flights to popular sun destinations, ordered all arrivals to test for COVID-19 and swallow hefty quarantine costs.

The federal government has approved an Ottawa company's made-in-Canada rapid COVID-19 test, Health Canada confirmed on Saturday, January 23, 2021, as the nation's top doctor warned the virus's impact on the health-care system showed no signs of abating.

The patient, when he came into the hospital ER with what seemed to be mild pneumonia, wasn't that sick and might otherwise have been sent home.

Canada is not getting any COVID-19 vaccine doses from Pfizer-BioNTech next week and the federal government says it can't tell provinces exactly how many doses to expect over the next month.

Some provincial authorities saw encouraging signs in the fight against COVID-19 on Monday, January 18, 2021, even as experts warned that it's too soon to draw conclusions from the data and provinces scrambled to deal with a looming shortage of Pfizer vaccines.

A decline in the number hospitalizations in Ontario and Quebec on Sunday, January 17, 2021, provided some small glimmers of a hope in a day marked by a rising COVID-19 death toll and record-breaking cases in New Brunswick.

British Columbia's decision to seek legal advice on limiting travel reinforces the message that it isn't the time to go on vacation across the country, Canada's chief medical officer of health said on Friday, January 15, 2021.

The federal government has awarded international accounting firm Deloitte a $16-million contract to build a national computer system to manage the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

It was a day of disparity in Canada's protracted battle against the novel coronavirus, with some provinces recording alarmingly high numbers of infections on on Sunday, January 10, 2021, while at least one province managed to whittle new cases to zero.

Touting the need for drastic action, Quebec became the first province to impose a curfew on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, as soaring COVID-19 infections across Canada intensified the strain on hospitals and prompted some Ontario morgues to run out of space.

With some morgues running out of space and hospitals facing an explosion in critically ill patients, Canada's COVID-19 caseload rose sharply on Wednesday, while Quebec mulled tighter restrictions that could include the country's first curfew. 

Canada is the latest country to investigate how to stretch vaccine doses as far as possible, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to have tragic consequences all around the world.

Anyone arriving in Canada starting Jan. 7 will need to have a negative COVID-19 test before boarding a flight, the federal government said on Thursday, December 31, 2020, as the Liberals urged vacationers abroad to prepare.

The federal government defended its approach to securing Canada's border against COVID-19 on Tuesday, December 22, 2020, as Ontario Premier Doug Ford once again called for more testing at points of entry.

Canada's top public health officer has been a model of stoicism through the first year of COVID-19, but Dr. Theresa Tam still got a little choked up last week when the first Canadians were inoculated with a COVID-19 vaccine.