By: Elena De Luigi

StoryMap by: Kemone Moodley

Read Time: 2 mins.

After more than 20 years in the music business, Toronto’s favourite Soundscapes Records is closing its doors this spring.

The local shop thanked their customers for their support in a thank-you note on their website.

“The last 20 years have seen a golden age in access to the world’s recorded music history both in physical media and online. We were happy to be a part of sharing our knowledge of some of that great music with you.”

In an interview, Soundscapes employee Phil Liberbaum told NOW Magazine that the record shop’s demise is directly related to the COVID-19 pandemic. With the province continually changing its restrictions, concert-ticket sales and limitations on gatherings plummeted, and the store could no longer keep up with the costs.

“We had a significant number of loyal customers who came in during the reopening in June after the first lockdown, but it wasn’t enough,” he said.

Other local favourites in the city that have closed their doors include Gandhi Indian Cuisine, Dave’s, Crocodile Rock Bar, Universal Grill, Pappas Grill, The Boat, Moo Frites, Vesuvio Pizzeria and Spaghetti House, Underground Garage, The Hideout, The Beaver, Scallywags, Lucky Star and Café Crepe.

According to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), 58,000 businesses across Canada have closed their doors permanently, citing financial strain from COVID-19 closures and restrictions.

The federation’s small business dashboard shows that as of March 9 this year, 62 per cent of Canadian small businesses are open while only 31 per cent are hitting or exceeding routine sales numbers. In Ontario, only 55 per cent are open, with 27 per cent seeing normal or higher revenue goals being met.

These statistics mean that the national average of debt per business was $170,000, with the agriculture and natural resources sector reaching an average of $329,000. Additionally, the total amount of debt of small businesses in Canada is $135 billion, while the industry with the most businesses in debt was hospitality, scoring 91 per cent.

The CFIB also found that one in six businesses in Canada is at risk of closing, meaning 71,000 to 222,000 are in jeopardy with 2.4 million jobs at stake.

In turn, the federation reported 73 per cent of independent businesses took on debt due to COVID-19, while 76 per cent are expected to take longer than one year to pay off those debts.

India achieved its highest number of vaccinations on a single day, administering over three million COVID-19 vaccines this Monday. In what is regarded as one of the world’s largest inoculation drives, India has jabbed more than 30 million people with at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine to date. Accounting for as much as 62 per cent of global vaccine production, India is deemed a global pharmaceutical powerhouse.

India has quietly pursued “vaccine diplomacy” at a time where international cooperation in sharing vaccines is limited. Its Vaccine Friendship campaign has shipped hundreds of thousands of Indian-made Covishield vaccines, manufactured under license from Oxford-AstraZeneca to some 60 countries, says Channel News Asia. They have also offered 1.1 billion vaccine doses to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) COVAX program to distribute COVID-19 vaccines to poorer countries.

As remarkable as these statistics are, India is not the leader in doses administered worldwide relatively speaking. The Our World in Data project driven by Oxford University updates their data each morning with the official numbers of global vaccinations by country per 100 people. Today, the data revealed that only two per cent of the entire population of India has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccination.

Data from Bloomberg COVID Vaccine Global Tracker (Visualized by Rinna Diamantakos)

Data from The New York Times Covid World Vaccination Tracker (Visualized by Rinna Diamantakos)

Israel on the other hand, has impressively jabbed 59 per cent of its population with at least one dose of a vaccine. Having inoculated its population faster than any other country, 48 per cent of its total population is fully vaccinated. The Seychelles, U.A.E., Maldives, and the U.K. trail behind as leaders in vaccination doses administered.

Despite this impressive headway, countries like Egypt, Uganda, and Iran have vaccinated less than one per cent of their populations.

This stark gap between vaccination programs in different countries reveals the locations left behind in the sprint to receive a vaccine. “It’s a race to get vaccinated and we just tripped,” said James Watmough, a University of New Brunswick mathematician.

As of February 14, there were still 130 countries that had not yet started vaccinating residents, according to NPR.

With over 381 million vaccine doses administered to date worldwide, the doses remain relatively scarce globally. According to the New York Times, less wealthy countries are relying on the COVAX vaccine-sharing arrangement, which aims to provide two billion doses by the end of 2021.

As newly approved vaccines and potential treatments for coronavirus surface around the globe, there are “a handful of countries that have set specific vaccination targets, but for the rest of the world the picture is less clear,” writes BBC.