China hopes to ‘take the lead in achieving herd immunity,’ health agency director says.
Italy set to go back into lockdown next week.
Have a question about the coronavirus pandemic? You can reach us at COVID@cbc.ca
Roughly 5,000 workers at an Amazon warehouse near Toronto are staying home for at least two weeks because of an ongoing outbreak of COVID-19 at the facility.
Health officials ordered the warehouse in Brampton close, effective 12:01 a.m. Saturday, after 240 of its workers tested positive for the virus that causes the respiratory illness.
Peel Public Health said it’s possible that everyone working there was at high risk for exposure to the coronavirus. It said all workers must self-isolate until March 27, unless they have tested positive in the last 90 days and completed quarantine.
WATCH | Brampton, Ont., Amazon warehouse closed after 240 workers test positive for COVID-19:
Peel Region is ordering an Amazon warehouse to close, after outbreaks there led to hundreds of COVID-19 cases. A worker describes the conditions inside. 1:49
Amazon said in a statement it has taken measures to keep workers safe during the pandemic, including providing buses to transport them to the warehouse.
All employees at the Heritage Road facility have been tested for COVID-19 twice in the past three weeks, the company said.
As more Canadians get their COVID-19 vaccines, B.C. Premier John Horgan on Friday said he backs the concept of a so-called COVID-19 vaccine passport for international travellers.
However, he said he’s not sold on a similar system for British Columbia residents to attend local events like sports or entertainment.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Friday he’s reluctant to introduce a system of vaccine passports to show proof of immunization because of lingering concerns about inequities — but such a system might be necessary for international travel.
Trudeau said he’s uneasy with the idea of a national program to document vaccination status as it could marginalize people who, for whatever reason, can’t or won’t get a vaccine.
What’s happening across Canada
As of 9 a.m. ET on Saturday, Canada had reported 904,706 cases of COVID-19, with 31,087 cases considered active. A CBC News tally of deaths stood at 22,415.
Ontario reported 1,468 new cases of COVID-19 on Saturday and 11 additional deaths. On Friday, the province reported 1,371 new cases of COVID-19 and 18 more deaths.
Meanwhile, it was a second consecutive day of record-high vaccinations, with 43,503 doses administered yesterday. A total of 1,062,910 doses of vaccine have been administered in the province so far.
In Atlantic Canada, Nova Scotia reported one new case of COVID-19 on Friday, as did Newfoundland and Labrador.New Brunswick reported three new cases and one additional death. Prince Edward Island reported no new cases.
WATCH | Canadians who saved during pandemic expected to go on spending spree:
Workers who maintained their income during the last year have saved up a fortune under lockdowns and could soon go on a spending spree. We talk to some of the people who are counting on it. 1:50
In Quebec, health officials reported 753 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday and nine additional deaths. Hospitalizations stood at 550, with 106 COVID-19 patients in intensive care.
The update came a day after Premier François Legault on Thursday praised essential workers for their efforts and urged people to remember the lives lost in the pandemic — more than 10,500 in Quebec alone.
“We lost grandmothers, grandfathers, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, friends, and today, Quebec remembers these people that left us too soon,” he said at an event marking the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration of a global pandemic.
WATCH | The future of online learning post-pandemic:
In life after lockdown, does the future of education include online learning in some form? 2:00
Across the North, there were no new cases reported in Nunavut, Yukon and the Northwest Territories on Friday.
In the Prairie provinces, Manitoba reported 104 new cases of COVID-19 and one new death on Friday, which was the one-year anniversary of the first cases of coronavirus in the province. This is the first time in more than three weeks that Manitoba has had a daily case count above 100.
Meanwhile, Saskatchewan reported 176 new cases and three new deaths. The province is recommending that residents of Regina and area, particularly those older than 50, limit interactions with others amid an increase in community transmission of variants of concern in the region.
Meanwhile, Alberta reported 425 new cases and two new deaths, as the province continued to lower the age range of those able to get COVID-19 vaccinations in a staggered rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine for Albertans who don’t have a severe chronic illness.
There were two new groups eligible to book on Friday: all Albertans born in 1959 and 1960, and all First Nations, Métis and Inuit born in 1974 and 1975.
Residents watch television at CHSLD Rose de Lima seniors residence Friday on March 12, 2021 in Laval, Que. Almost all of the residents in Quebec senior residences have received at least their first COVID-19 vaccination shot. (Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press)
In British Columbia, health officials announced 648 new cases on Friday, the highest number since Jan. 7, but no additional deaths.
The update comes a day after the provincial health officer said she is now allowing up to 10 people to meet outdoors after nearly four months of restrictions that barred in-person gatherings between people from different households.
Dr. Bonnie Henry said restrictions on indoor gatherings and rules for restaurants, bars, retail stores and other venues remain in place.
What’s happening around the world
As of Sunday morning, more than 119.2 million people around the world had been reported to having COVID-19, according to a tracking tool maintained by the U.S.-based Johns Hopkins University. Of those, more than 67.5 million were listed as recovered. The global death toll stood at more than 2.6 million.
China is aiming to vaccinate 70 to 80 per cent of its population by mid-2022, the head of the country’s Center for Disease Control said Saturday.
People wait in a queue to receive the coronavirus vaccine in Beijing on March 8. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)
With four approved vaccines, China will vaccinate 900 million to 1 billion people, Gao Fu, the CDC head, said in an interview with Chinese state media broadcaster CGTN. “We hope that China can take the lead in achieving herd immunity in the world,” he said.
Herd immunity occurs when enough of the population has immunity, either from vaccination or past infection, to stop the uncontrolled spread of an infectious disease such as COVID-19.
China had administered 52.5 million vaccine doses through the end of February. It has been slower in its vaccination campaign than many other countries, including the U.S., government health experts have acknowledged.
China has committed roughly 10 times more doses abroad than it has distributed at home.
In Europe, Italy is set to enter a near-nationwide lockdown in the coming week. Officials have ordered schools, museums, bars and restaurants and non-essential shops to close on Monday in most regions.
The restrictions will remain in place at least until Easter. People are urged to remain home, except for essential trips. The rules will apply to all of Italy over the Easter weekend, Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s office confirmed on Friday.
Medical staff work in the COVID-19 unit of the Bolognini hospital in Seriate, in Italy’s Lombardy region, on Friday. (Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images)
The move is a repeat of one year ago this past week when all of Italy went into a strict lockdown, the first of the pandemic in Europe.
Italian health officials say new hospital admissions to ICUs due to COVID-19 this week were well over 200 a day, twice the number they were as the second wave of the respiratory illness began last fall.
WATCH | Benefits of AstraZeneca’s vaccine outweigh risks, experts say:
Despite some European countries temporarily halting use of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine after 30 cases of blood clots, experts maintain it is still safe to use in Canada. 2:01
Elsewhere in Europe, Poland reported 21,049 daily coronavirus cases on Saturday, health ministry data showed, the highest figure since November 2020.
The health ministry said there were a further 343 coronavirus-related deaths. In total, Poland has reported 1,889,360 cases and 47,068 deaths.
In the Middle East, Jordan has become the first country in the region to receive coronavirus vaccines through the global COVAX initiative.
A plane carrying 144,000 shots of AstraZeneca vaccine landed in Amman’s airport late Friday and was greeted by representatives of the agencies supporting the COVAX program — the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the European Union.
The COVAX alliance aims to share COVID-19 vaccines with more than 90 lower and middle-income nations. However, the program is facing delays, underfunding and limited supply.
WATCH | Air pollution dropped significantly during the pandemic:
Air pollution dropped significantly during the pandemic, and health experts hope that could lead to changes that could save lives. 1:56
The EU has allocated 8 million euros to support Jordan’s purchase of vaccines. A second shipment from COVAX is expected in April.
Jordan launched its vaccination drive in mid-January with plans to inoculate over 4 million residents in 2021, according to Health Minister Nathir Obeidat.
The kingdom, home to nearly 10 million people, has approved five vaccine types, including Russian and Chinese ones. The vaccination campaign also targets some of the 650,000 Syrian refugees.
The country is struggling to contain the surge of infections. It has reported over 465,000 cases and more than 5,200 deaths.
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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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.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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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.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
