The piecemeal way in which journalism covers the pandemic is part of why we aren't understanding it. Here is a small thread related to Roberta Place in Barrie.

To begin, this outbreak was largely reported through the lens of the "fast moving variant" strain of COVID. How fast? Well, on Jan 21, CP24 reported that a worker got sick through close contact with a travel case. This worker went home but, within "2 days" 55 people had covid.

So that would have been Jan. 8, outbreak declared meaning 55 people by Jan. 10 would have had COVID, based on two CP24 news reports. Except! It didn't actually go that fast ...

In the early days of the outbreak, it got no coverage. Outbreak Jan 8. First mention of Roberta Home on Twitter was Jan 11 by @MArsalidesCTV. Then he reported on Jan 12 42 people had COVID ... 40 residents and two staff.

(Are we really supposed to believe that two staff triggered such a massive outbreak, just after the holidays? It's possible but more likely is that some residents got covid from non-staff too -- recall, a care provider has since died)

So rather than 55 cases by Jan 10, we actually had 42 cases by Jan 12. A slower climb. But the speed was key to the story -- this outbreak, and its incredible speed, was thanks to the variant (this is said over and over in media coverage)

Today however, we find out that conditions withing Roberta Place were terrible to stop covid from circulating: sick residents mixing, lack of staff, shared rooms of sick and not sick residents, etc. Nothing was learned! Ten months into this!!

So Roberta Place got two weeks of "this is because of the new covid strain" coverage when in fact, it's just another story of mismanagement, for-profit failures and a government who simply doesn't care enough to insist people are protected.