One person has tested positive for the novel coronavirus in London and Middlesex, six others have recovered, and three seniors’ home outbreaks have been resolved, local health officials reported on Friday.
The update brings the total number of confirmed cases in the region to 549, of which 403 have recovered, or about 73 per cent of cases. Fifty-six people have died, a tally that remained unchanged from the day before.
The new case was reported in London and is not linked to a long-term care or retirement home, or to Ontario Plants Propagation (OPP), where an outbreak among migrant farmworkers has left at least 21 sickened, including one case confirmed by Elgin and Oxford county health officials.
Of the 13 confirmed cases that have been reported in London and Middlesex since Monday, none have been associated with seniors’ homes or to the OPP outbreak.
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Overall, at least 512 of the region’s cases have been reported in London — about 93 per cent — while 20 cases have been reported in Strathroy-Caradoc and seven cases have been in Middlesex Centre.
Elsewhere, four cases each have been reported in North Middlesex and Thames Centre, and one each has been reported in Lucan Biddulph and Southwest Middlesex.
Health officials say the number of active outbreaks in London and Middlesex dropped to three on Friday after three other outbreaks were declared over the day before.
The outbreaks at Country Terrace, Waverly Mansion and Chelsey Park (LTCH) were declared on May 15, 18 and 23, respectively.
Combined, health unit data shows the three outbreaks saw six positive cases involving one resident and five staff members. The resident, reported positive at Waverly Mansion, later died.
At least 19 of the 24 outbreaks that have been declared locally during the pandemic have involved seniors’ facilities.
2:19 Coronavirus outbreak: Ontario long-term care operator executive allegedly recorded making inappropriate comments
Coronavirus outbreak: Ontario long-term care operator executive allegedly recorded making inappropriate comments
Three active outbreaks remain in the region, the lowest number of simultaneous COVID-19 outbreaks since late March.
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Outbreaks remain at Kensington Village, Sisters of St. Joseph and Chelsey Park Retirement Community. They were declared April 3, April 17 and May 30, respectively.
Combined, the three facilities have reported at least 51 cases involving 27 residents and 24 staff members, according to health unit data. At least nine residents have died, along with two staff members.
In terms of total case count, the most severe of the three outbreaks has been at Sisters of St. Joseph, where at least 25 cases have been reported involving 13 residents and 12 staff members.
Of those, three residents and one staff member have since died.
At least 457 outbreaks have been reported at seniors’ homes across the province since mid-January, according to Public Health Ontario. Of those, at least 247 remained active as of Thursday.
The number of hospitalized patients in the city declined by one to eight as of midnight Friday, according to the most recent update from London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC).
The figure is a combination of cases at University and Victoria hospitals. It’s not clear whether any are in intensive care.
Meantime, in its most recent update on Tuesday, St. Joseph’s Health Care reported it was treating no COVID-19 patients at St. Joseph’s Hospital. The only case in its system is located at the main building of Parkwood Institute.
Hospitalizations account for about 19 per cent of all cases in London and Middlesex. Of those, 5.3 per cent have had to be admitted to intensive care.
A vast majority of hospitalized cases, nearly 90 per cent, involve patients over 50, according to health unit figures.
LHSC announced Friday that it would stop releasing an updated number of positive cases among staff members unless the tally increased by five or greater. The organization said it was to protect staff privacy.
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In its update on Wednesday, LHSC said there had been at least 42 staff cases reported during the pandemic.
At least 18 staff members with St. Joseph’s Health Care have tested positive. It’s not clear how many cases remain active.
At least 410 hospital workers across Ontario have tested positive for the virus since mid-January, while 393 residents/patients have also been infected, according to Public Health Ontario.
One person has recovered from the novel coronavirus, officials with Southwestern Public Health (SWPH) reported Friday.
The total number of confirmed cases remains at 75, of which now 66 have recovered. Four people have died. No new deaths have been reported since April 22.
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SWPH reported three recoveries on Thursday, one recovery Wednesday and one new case and recovery on Tuesday.
Officials say an outbreak at Secord Trails that has left at least eight staff sickened remains active as of Friday. The long-term care facility in Ingersoll has seen an active outbreak since May 18.
Of the five cases that remain active in the region, three are in Oxford County, including two in Tillsonburg and one in Woodstock, while two remain active in Elgin County, both in St. Thomas.
According to health unit data, no new COVID-19-related hospitalizations have been reported since April 28. No COVID-19 patients have been in the hospital since the start of May.
As of Friday, 5,537 tests had been conducted in Elgin and Oxford counties, of which 521 remained pending results.
Of the tests conducted in the region, 1.5 per cent come back positive, according to SWPH.
Huron and Perth
No new cases, deaths, or recoveries have been reported by Huron Perth Public Health (HPPH).
At least 54 cases have been reported in the region, of which 46 have recovered and five have died. No new deaths have been reported in the region since April 29.
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The last new case to be reported by health officials was on Wednesday. Before that, a case was reported on Monday.
Three active cases remain in the region, including two in St. Marys — both reported earlier this week — and one in Stratford.
The number of active outbreaks remains at zero. A total of seven have been declared, linked to 27 cases.
All but seven of those cases were reported at Greenwood Court in Stratford. An outbreak there saw six residents and 10 staff members test positive, and four people die. It was declared over May 11.
Twenty-six cases have been reported in Stratford, while 13 have been reported in Huron County and 11 in Perth County.
Four cases have been in St. Marys, including the region’s first two.
The health unit said 3,829 tests had been administered in Huron and Perth as of Friday. Of those, 124 were awaiting test results.
Sarnia and Lambton
One person has tested positive for the novel coronavirus while six people have recovered, officials with Lambton Public Health (LPH) reported late Thursday.
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It brings the total number of confirmed cases to 267, of which 217 have recovered. Twenty-four people have also died, a tally that remained unchanged.
Health unit figures show Thursday’s case is not connected to an ongoing outbreak at Vision Nursing Home in Sarnia that has sickened 26 residents and 25 staff members. Nine residents have since died.
Still-positive residents from the home have been moved to Bluewater Health hospital to keep the outbreak from spreading.
The hospital says it’s treating 12 COVID-19 patients as of Friday, along with 26 who are suspected positive or are awaiting tests — figures unchanged from the day before.
The outbreak at Vision Nursing Home is the lone active outbreak in the county.
Nearly all of Lambton’s outbreak-related cases are linked to Vision Nursing Home and to a since-resolved outbreak at Landmark Village.
According to the health unit, 40 per cent of all COVID-19 cases in the county have been outbreak-related, followed by 35 per cent that are related to close contact.
Health officials reported one recovery late Wednesday, one death, three new cases and three recoveries late Tuesday, and one death and six recoveries late Monday.
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As of late Thursday, LPH said 7,575 test results had been received by health officials. It’s not clear how many cases are still pending.
MILWAUKEE (AP) — Whooping cough is at its highest level in a decade for this time of year, U.S. health officials reported Thursday.
There have been 18,506 cases of whooping cough reported so far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. That’s the most at this point in the year since 2014, when cases topped 21,800.
The increase is not unexpected — whooping cough peaks every three to five years, health experts said. And the numbers indicate a return to levels before the coronavirus pandemic, when whooping cough and other contagious illnesses plummeted.
Still, the tally has some state health officials concerned, including those in Wisconsin, where there have been about 1,000 cases so far this year, compared to a total of 51 last year.
Nationwide, CDC has reported that kindergarten vaccination rates dipped last year and vaccine exemptions are at an all-time high. Thursday, it released state figures, showing that about 86% of kindergartners in Wisconsin got the whooping cough vaccine, compared to more than 92% nationally.
Whooping cough, also called pertussis, usually starts out like a cold, with a runny nose and other common symptoms, before turning into a prolonged cough. It is treated with antibiotics. Whooping cough used to be very common until a vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, which is now part of routine childhood vaccinations. It is in a shot along with tetanus and diphtheria vaccines. The combo shot is recommended for adults every 10 years.
“They used to call it the 100-day cough because it literally lasts for 100 days,” said Joyce Knestrick, a family nurse practitioner in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Whooping cough is usually seen mostly in infants and young children, who can develop serious complications. That’s why the vaccine is recommended during pregnancy, to pass along protection to the newborn, and for those who spend a lot of time with infants.
But public health workers say outbreaks this year are hitting older kids and teens. In Pennsylvania, most outbreaks have been in middle school, high school and college settings, an official said. Nearly all the cases in Douglas County, Nebraska, are schoolkids and teens, said Justin Frederick, deputy director of the health department.
That includes his own teenage daughter.
“It’s a horrible disease. She still wakes up — after being treated with her antibiotics — in a panic because she’s coughing so much she can’t breathe,” he said.
It’s important to get tested and treated with antibiotics early, said Dr. Kris Bryant, who specializes in pediatric infectious diseases at Norton Children’s in Louisville, Kentucky. People exposed to the bacteria can also take antibiotics to stop the spread.
“Pertussis is worth preventing,” Bryant said. “The good news is that we have safe and effective vaccines.”
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AP data journalist Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
How a sperm and egg fuse together has long been a mystery.
New research by scientists in Austria provides tantalizing clues, showing fertilization works like a lock and key across the animal kingdom, from fish to people.
“We discovered this mechanism that’s really fundamental across all vertebrates as far as we can tell,” said co-author Andrea Pauli at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna.
The team found that three proteins on the sperm join to form a sort of key that unlocks the egg, allowing the sperm to attach. Their findings, drawn from studies in zebrafish, mice, and human cells, show how this process has persisted over millions of years of evolution. Results were published Thursday in the journal Cell.
Scientists had previously known about two proteins, one on the surface of the sperm and another on the egg’s membrane. Working with international collaborators, Pauli’s lab used Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence tool AlphaFold — whose developers were awarded a Nobel Prize earlier this month — to help them identify a new protein that allows the first molecular connection between sperm and egg. They also demonstrated how it functions in living things.
It wasn’t previously known how the proteins “worked together as a team in order to allow sperm and egg to recognize each other,” Pauli said.
Scientists still don’t know how the sperm actually gets inside the egg after it attaches and hope to delve into that next.
Eventually, Pauli said, such work could help other scientists understand infertility better or develop new birth control methods.
The work provides targets for the development of male contraceptives in particular, said David Greenstein, a genetics and cell biology expert at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study.
The latest study “also underscores the importance of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry,” he said in an email.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Patients who are older, don’t speak English, and don’t have a high school education are more likely to experience harm during a hospital stay in Canada, according to new research.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information measured preventableharmful events from 2023 to 2024, such as bed sores and medication errors,experienced by patients who received acute care in hospital.
The research published Thursday shows patients who don’t speak English or French are 30 per cent more likely to experience harm. Patients without a high school education are 20 per cent more likely to endure harm compared to those with higher education levels.
The report also found that patients 85 and older are five times more likely to experience harm during a hospital stay compared to those under 20.
“The goal of this report is to get folks thinking about equity as being a key dimension of the patient safety effort within a hospital,” says Dana Riley, an author of the report and a program lead on CIHI’s population health team.
When a health-care provider and a patient don’t speak the same language, that can result in the administration of a wrong test or procedure, research shows. Similarly, Riley says a lower level of education is associated with a lower level of health literacy, which can result in increased vulnerability to communication errors.
“It’s fairly costly to the patient and it’s costly to the system,” says Riley, noting the average hospital stay for a patient who experiences harm is four times more expensive than the cost of a hospital stay without a harmful event – $42,558 compared to $9,072.
“I think there are a variety of different reasons why we might start to think about patient safety, think about equity, as key interconnected dimensions of health-care quality,” says Riley.
The analysis doesn’t include data on racialized patients because Riley says pan-Canadian data was not available for their research. Data from Quebec and some mental health patients was also excluded due to differences in data collection.
Efforts to reduce patient injuries at one Ontario hospital network appears to have resulted in less harm. Patient falls at Mackenzie Health causing injury are down 40 per cent, pressure injuries have decreased 51 per cent, and central line-associated bloodstream infections, such as IV therapy, have been reduced 34 per cent.
The hospital created a “zero harm” plan in 2019 to reduce errors after a hospital survey revealed low safety scores. They integrated principles used in aviation and nuclear industries, which prioritize safety in complex high-risk environments.
“The premise is first driven by a cultural shift where people feel comfortable actually calling out these events,” says Mackenzie Health President and Chief Executive Officer Altaf Stationwala.
They introduced harm reduction training and daily meetings to discuss risks in the hospital. Mackenzie partnered with virtual interpreters that speak 240 languages and understand medical jargon. Geriatric care nurses serve the nearly 70 per cent of patients over the age of 75, and staff are encouraged to communicate as frequently as possible, and in plain language, says Stationwala.
“What we do in health care is we take control away from patients and families, and what we know is we need to empower patients and families and that ultimately results in better health care.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
