The 160-bed hospital in the Po River Valley town of Chiari has no more room for patients stricken with the highly contagious B117 variant of COVID-19 first identified in Britain, which has put hospitals in Italy’s northern Brescia province on high alert.
That history was repeating itself one year after Lombardy became the epicentre of Italy’s pandemic was a sickening realization for Dr. Gabriele Zanolini, who runs the COVID ward in Chiari’s M. Mellini Hospital.
“You know that there are patients in the emergency room, and you don’t know where to put them,” Zanolini told The Associated Press. “This for me is anguish, not to be able to respond to people who need to be treated. The most difficult moment is to find ourselves again in a state of emergency, after so much time.”
The B117 variant surge has filled 90 per cent of hospital beds in Brescia province, which borders the Veneto and Emilia-Romagna regions, as Italy crossed the grim threshold of 100,000 pandemic dead on Monday and will mark the one-year anniversary Wednesday of Italy’s tough lockdown, the first in the West.
While Zanolini was able to offer a safety valve to hard-hit Bergamo during last spring’s deadly surge, and to Milan and Varese in the fall, now he must ask hospitals elsewhere in the region to take virus patients he himself cannot admit.
A man looks out of a booth as he receives the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine at Fiumicino Airport in Rome on Monday. The country has seen more than three million cases of COVID-19 and more than 100,000 deaths. (Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters)
New measures are again being considered in Rome to tamp down the increase in new cases attributed to virus variants, including those first identified in South Africa and Brazil. With the B117 variant prevalent in Italy and racing from school-age children and adolescents through families, Lombardy has again put all schools on distance learning, as have several regions in the south, where the health-care system is more fragile.
Zanolini said in this surge, patients in the Chiari hospital COVID ward are increasingly family members — husbands and wives, fathers and sons. And unlike previous spikes, the average age has dropped, with many of the virus patients needing breathing aid between 45 and 55 years of age.
“We have seen, however, that they respond well to treatment,” Zanolini said of the younger patients, noting that mortality remains high among the elderly.
Pandemic ‘not yet defeated’
Despite months of renewed restrictions starting in October, Italy’s death toll remains stubbornly high — several hundred a day. It topped 100,000 this week, the second-highest in Europe after Britain.
Italy’s new premier, Mario Draghi, is focusing on vaccines to help the country emerge from pandemic, pledging in a video message this week to intensify the campaign significantly in the coming weeks.
“Everyone must do his part to contain the spread of this virus,” Draghi said Tuesday. “But above all, the government must do its part. Rather, it must try to do more every day. The pandemic is not yet defeated.”
The vaccine is the only way out, Zanolini said. He sees that people have grown weary of the restrictions, and are becoming too relaxed about gatherings, distancing and masks.
“We are worried because we don’t see an end. It seems like the tunnel is still very long,” Zanolini said. “We find ourselves hit by another wave, and we are very tired.”
-From The Associated Press, last updated at 8:20 a.m. ET
What’s happening across Canada
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Days after Health Canada approved the AstraZeneca-Oxford COVID-19 vaccine for use in Canada, the vaccine advisory committee recommended against using it on those 65 and older. Andrew Chang explores why it happened and the real-world consequences. 3:12
As of early Tuesday morning, Canada had reported 890,703 cases of COVID-19, with 30,332 cases considered active. A CBC News tally of deaths stood at 22,276.
In Nova Scotia, health officials reported no new cases of COVID-19 for the first time since Feb. 12.
Health officials in Quebec on Monday reported 579 new cases of COVID-19 as well as nine additional deaths due to the illness. Hospitalizations declined by two to 590, with 108 people in intensive care, which is one more than a day earlier.
Ontario reported 1,631 new cases of COVID-19 on Monday, though health officials noted that a data delay had resulted in a higher than expected number of new cases. The province also reported 10 additional deaths. Hospitalizations in the province increased to 626, with 282 people in intensive care units with COVID-19.
In the Prairie provinces, Manitoba reported 63 new cases of COVID-19 on Monday and one additional death.
Dr. Brent Roussin, the chief provincial public health officer, said that for the most part, numbers in the province continue to trend in the right direction — but he expressed concern about the number of people still in hospital and intensive care units. As of Monday, the province had 164 COVID-19 patients in hospital, with 22 in intensive care units.
“There continues to be a need for us to be on guard,” Roussin said. “The variants of concern add to that need. We are still at risk.”
Join us as experts answer some of your vaccine questions on a special CBC News National Town Hall on Tuesday, March 9. We’ll discuss the differences between vaccines, how vaccine passports work and where you might be in the queue. The special starts at 8 p.m. ET on CBC Gem and CBC News Network, and 10 p.m. local time (10:30 p.m. NST) on CBC Television.
In Saskatchewan, health officials reported 97 new cases of COVID-19 and one additional death on Monday. In neighbouring Alberta, health officials reported 278 new cases of COVID-19 and six additional deaths.
Across the North, there were no new cases reported in Nunavut, the Northwest Territories or Yukon.
-From CBC News and The Canadian Press, last updated at 7 a.m. ET
What’s happening around the world
WATCH | U.S. guidance a glimpse into life after COVID-19 vaccines:
New guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control may provide a glimpse of what life could look like after more people get COVID-19 vaccines, and it includes maskless gatherings. 2:01
As of early Tuesday morning, more than 117.2 million cases of COVID-19 had been reported worldwide, with more than 66.3 million of those cases listed as recovered by Johns Hopkins University, which maintains a case-tracking tool. The global death toll stood at more than 2.6 million.
A senior World Health Organization official said that so-called “vaccine passports” for COVID-19 should not be used for international travel because of numerous concerns, including ethical considerations that coronavirus vaccines are not easily available globally.
At a press briefing on Monday, WHO emergencies chief Dr. Michael Ryan said there are “real practical and ethical considerations” for countries considering using vaccine certification as a condition for travel, noting that the UN health agency advises against it for now.
“Vaccination is just not available enough around the world and is not available certainly on an equitable basis,” Ryan said. WHO has previously noted that it’s still unknown how long immunity lasts from the numerous licensed COVID-19 vaccines and that data is still being collected.
Ryan also noted the strategy might be unfair to people who cannot be vaccinated for certain reasons and that requiring vaccine passports might allow “inequity and unfairness [to] be further branded into the system.”
In the Asia-Pacific region, Indonesia has received about 1.1 million ready-to-use doses of vaccine produced by AstraZeneca under the global vaccine-sharing COVAX facility.
Singapore has launched a travel “bubble” business hotel that allows executives to do face-to-face meetings without a risk of exposure to the coronavirus, in one of the world’s first such facilities.The hotel has meeting rooms fitted with airtight glass panels to reduce the risk of transmission and even has a special compartment with an ultraviolet light to sanitize documents so they can be shared between participants.
In the Americas, preliminary studies suggest the AstraZeneca vaccine will protect against the P1 variant of the coronavirus, Mauricio Zuma, the head of production at Brazil’s Fiocruz biomedical institute, said on Monday, confirming a Reuters report from Friday.
A health-care worker arrives in an ambulance bringing a patient suspected of having COVID-19 to the public HRAN Hospital in Brasilia, Brazil, on Monday. (Eraldo Peres/The Associated Press)
South Africa remained the hardest-hit country in Africa, with more than 1.5 million reported cases of COVID-19 and more than 50,800 deaths.
In Europe, Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine against COVID-19 could be produced in Europe for the first time after a commercial deal to produce it in Italy was signed by the Moscow-based RDIF sovereign wealth fund and Swiss-based pharmaceutical company Adienne.
Hungary set records Tuesday for the number of COVID-19 patients being treated in Hungarian hospitals and the number of new daily virus deaths amid a powerful surge in cases.
Nearly 350 people in Hungary were hospitalized with the virus in the last 24 hours, bringing the number of hospitalizations on Tuesday to 8,270, breaking the previous record of 8,045 set on Dec. 8. The number of patients on ventilators also set a new record with 833. Health-care experts say that could within days reach the threshold of 1,000, the maximum number of critical patients the country’s health system can handle.
A new round of lockdown measures went into effect in Hungary on Monday requiring most shops to close for two weeks. Kindergartens and primary schools have also been closed until April 7.
Medical workers tend to a patient at the intensive care unit for patients infected with COVID-19 at a hospital in Boulogne-Billancourt, near Paris, on Monday. (Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty Images)
The number of people treated in French intensive care units for COVID-19 reached 3,849 on Monday, while total hospitalizations for the disease increased for the second day running, to 25,195.
In the Middle East, Iran’s total reported cases was approaching 1.7 million. The country has recorded more than 60,800 deaths.
-From The Associated Press and Reuters, last updated at 7 a.m. ET
VANCOUVER – A disciplinary investigation has found a former Vancouver police sergeant shared “disrespectful” commentary on a fellow officer’s court testimony about being sexually assaulted by a colleague.
The decision against Narinder Dosanjh, obtained by The Canadian Press, includes the running commentary on the woman’s testimony — apparently written by someone inside the courtroom — that calls her a “bad drunk” and says there was “no way” her case would be proved.
Former New Westminster police chief Dave Jansen, the external officer who rendered the decision against Dosanjh, says his assessment accounts for a culture of treating officers who testify against each other as “rats.”
Former Vancouver constable Jagraj Roger Berar was convicted in 2021 and sentenced to a year in jail for assaulting the woman, who can’t be identified because of a publication ban on her name.
Jansen says in his ruling, dated Oct. 11, that the comments in a Vancouver police group chat appear “supportive” of Berar and reflect “all-too-common myths” about women who make sexual assault allegations.
While Jansen found Dosanjh committed discreditable conduct by sharing the chats, a complaint against a more-senior Vancouver officer who was inside the courtroom, and who the victim and other officers believed wrote the commentary, were not substantiated.
The ruling says Jansen, who retired as New Westminster’s chief constable, would accept submissions before deciding how Dosanjh should be punished.
The woman who was assaulted was the complainant in the disciplinary investigation, and said in an interview she felt “vindicated” by Jansen’s decision because it “truly paints what I’ve been through,” after reporting a fellow officer for sexual assault.
She said many other women in municipal policing fear speaking out about ill-treatment at work, and some have told her about being assaulted and harassed but feared ruining their careers if they complained.
“This decision is important for those women to see,” she said. “It shows the tides are changing. Like, this is the first win I’ve had.”
A spokesman for the Surrey Police Service, where Dosanjh now works, did not immediately answer a question about how he was penalized, and said Dosanjh declined an interview request with The Canadian Press.
In his decision, Jansen said there was an “unfortunate but often pervasive” culture of treating officers who complain as “‘rats’, who betrayed their colleagues.”
“In terms of the messages themselves, Sergeant Dosanjh alleges that they are not degrading, humiliating or derogatory and do not attack the personal character of the complainant. I disagree,” Jansen wrote.
The decision includes a screenshot of the commentary about the complainant, who said the order of the messages appeared to refer to her evidence while she was being cross-examined and suggested the comments were written by someone listening to her testimony.
The commentary on a Vancouver police chat group on the Signal messaging app said the victim “wore a wire twice,” and “admitted in cross to possibly drinking way more alcohol than she originally claimed.”
“Her memory is super hazy and there’s no way you can prove beyond reasonable doubt,” the person wrote.
“And she admitted that she is really bad drunk,” they added.
Another message said it was a “nail in the coffin” of the case that video showed the complainant “cuddling, holding hands” with Berar.
The victim, who became aware of the commentary when a friend in the department showed them to her, was distressed by the messages and disputed their accuracy, said Jansen.
“The comments also appear to reflect some of the all-too-common myths around women making allegations of sexual assault. Some of these myths include the belief that because a victim socialized with the perpetrator, or engaged in some consensual activity with him, therefore she must have consented to the assault,” he wrote.
Jansen’s decision said Dosanjh shared the messages with a fellow officer after getting them from a “VPD chat group that he claims he knew little about, from a co-worker he claims not to be able to identify.”
The decision said other officers believed the commentary was written bya more-senior officer in the department who had been present at the trial, but Jansen said the discreditable conduct complaint against that person was unsubstantiated.
The decision said Dosanjh claimed he was the “fall guy” and “a pawn in a broader game.”
Jansen’s decision said Dosanjh was a senior officer and supervisor who was aware of the “vulnerability of victims of sexual crimes and of the myths that surround sexual assault victims.”
It said Dosanjh’s “distribution of these messages that were disrespectful of an alleged victim of sexual violence who was also a co-worker, should they become public, would likely discredit the reputation of the police force.”
The Vancouver Police Department did not immediately provide comment on Jansen’s decision.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 13, 2024.
FREDERICTON – The offspring of beetles imported from British Columbia are ready to take up the fight against an invasive insect that is killing hemlock trees in Nova Scotia.
Last fall and spring, about 5,000 Laricobius nigrinus beetles — affectionately called Lari by scientists — made an overnight journey from the West Coast.
Lucas Roscoe, research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, says in the fight against the woolly adelgid that is destroying swaths of hemlock trees in Nova Scotia, the first step was to make sure the Lari beetle can survive a Nova Scotia winter.
The one-to-two-millimetre black flying beetles were released across six sites in Nova Scotia that had the woolly adelgids.
In one of the sites, scientists placed cages of imported beetles and about 60 per cent of them were able to survive the winter in Nova Scotia, which Roscoe says is an encouraging rate.
He says the woolly adelgid was first seen in southwestern Nova Scotia in 2017 and the peppercorn-sized insect, aided by climate change, has since spread north.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 13, 2024.
Dozens of researchers across Canada, including renowned environmentalist David Suzuki, have joined a growing chorus of voices urging the federal government to halt the importation of an endangered monkey species for medical research in Quebec.
A letter signed by 80 scientists, academics, doctors and students says testing on long-tailed macaques from Cambodia should be banned due to ethical concerns and potential public-health risks.
“A decade ago, chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, ceased to be used for experimentation because using such animal ‘models’ could no longer be justified from scientific, ethical, and/or financial perspectives,” says the letter addressed to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, his environment minister and the premier of Quebec.
The researchers say they are also concerned about “the serious risks of transmission of zoonotic pathogens” that could be associated with transporting macaques.
Their letter urges the federal government to end charter flights that have been bringing the macaques into Canada, and to adopt regulations banning the importation of all primates for biomedical testing.
It’s the latest group to add more pressure on Ottawa to suspend the monkey imports by Charles River Laboratories, a U.S.-based pharmaceutical giant that has a sprawling facility in Montreal.
The company announced in 2023 that it was halting macaque imports into the U.S., after it was subpoenaed in a case that involved the indictment of two senior Cambodian officials over what authorities described as “multiple felonies for their role in bringing wild long-tailed macaques into the United States.”
No charges have been brought against Charles River Laboratories, or any of its officials, and the company has said it will fully co-operate with the U.S. investigation.
At around the same time, imports of monkeys from Cambodia into Canada dramatically surged, with Statistics Canada data showing a 500 per cent increase in 2023 from the year before.
Environment and Climate Change Canada, the federal department responsible for monitoring commercial trade in wildlife, confirmed to the Canadian Press that Charles River Laboratories has imported 6,769 long-tailed macaques into the country between January 2023 and August of this year. The monetary value of these imported macaques is around $120 million dollars, according to Statistics Canada.
The department previously said that officials rigorously and closely inspect imports of foreign animals, including those brought in by Charles River Laboratories, and that all macaque imports so far this year have complied with federal and international wildlife regulations.
The government and the company have both said that no Canadian laws have been broken.
Last month, the Canadian Transportation Authority issued a permit for another shipment on a cargo plane chartered by Charles River Laboratories. A flight tracker shows that a plane with the same flight number as what is shown on the permit departed Phnom Penh, Cambodia last Thursday, and arrived in Montreal on Friday.
Jesse Greener, a professor of chemistry at Laval University who signed the researchers’ letter to the government, said medical technology has developed to a point that makes it unjustifiable for the pharmaceutical industry to continue using live primates for testing.
“The government should take a leadership role and help researchers and surely the private sector to pivot from using these unethical, and I would say old and outdated and unreliable animal models, and embrace these much more efficient and ethical approaches that are … exploding right now,” said Greener, who has done research on methods to replace animals in such experiments.
“It is grotesque,” he said of the animal use. “It is time that we change the page on this chapter of terrible research and commercial activities.”
Canada banned the use of animals for cosmetic testing last year, but it is still legal to use live primates for drug testing purposes.
The federal government said a draft strategy aimed at reducing and replacing the use of animals in drug testing was published in September and open to public consultations for 60 days.
The strategy, which will be revised based on input from researchers, experts and others, is expected to be published in June 2025, it said.
“The government of Canada is committed to advancing efforts to replace, reduce, or refine the use of vertebrate animals in toxicity testing where possible,” Environment and Climate Change Canada said in a statement Tuesday.
Charles River Laboratories previously told The Canadian Press that while it is also committed to reducing its use of live primates, global regulatory bodies require drugs to be tested on animals before they are evaluated in humans.
The company said the use of non-human primates has been vital in developing treatments for various diseases and that the standards it applies in its facilities are exceeding global norms.
Matthew Green, a New Democrat MP who had previously called on the federal government to halt the latest shipment of macaques, said he has “great concern” about importing this exotic animal.
“Generally in Canada, Canadians like to believe that our government has higher regulations and more stringent enforcement protocols when it comes to protecting endangered species, yet this is not the case in comparison to what the United States has done,” he said.
Green and two of his NDP colleagues wrote a letter to three federal ministers last month, demanding an “immediate attention” to the issue.
The Animal Alliance of Canada also sent a letter to the environment minister in August, urging the immediate suspension of monkey importation from Cambodia.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 13, 2024.
