Lawmakers in both Canada and the United States are closer to getting money flowing to people affected by the economic turmoil caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In Canada, Government House Leader Pablo Rodriguez tweeted early Wednesday morning that the House had adopted the COVID-19 emergency support, which has $82 billion in aid to families and businesses impacted by the financial fallout from the new coronavirus
The Liberal government and opposition parties, particularly the Conservatives, had been wrangling over some of the measures included in the legislation — particularly around powers it granted to the government, which Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer described in a statement as an attempt at an “undemocratic power grab.”
In the U.S., Senate leaders from both parties and the White House came to an agreement on a $2 trillion aid package late Tuesday.
The plan, which delivers aid for workers, businesses and the health-care system, came after days of arguing over how funding for large industries would be structured.
In the U.K., which recently implemented tougher stay-at-home measures to try to combat the virus, there’s another high-profile case: Prince Charles has tested positive for the novel coronavirus. A spokesperson for Clarence House said he has displayed mild symptoms but otherwise is in good health, and has been working from home.
More than 425,000 people worldwide have been infected by the virus and almost 19,000 have died, according to a Johns Hopkins University case tracker. The novel coronavirus — which has been labelled SARS-CoV-2 — causes an illness called COVID-19, for which there is no proven vaccine or cure.
For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death.
It is the more severe cases — often requiring ventilators and specialized care — that threaten to overwhelm hospitals. Several countries are already running short of the critical equipment needed to treat patients and keep doctors and nurses safe. Doctors are dying in Italy, and Spain says 14 per cent of its infections are health-care workers.
In China, where the virus was first reported in late 2019, officials were loosening some restrictions in hard-hit Hubei province. In neighbouring India, meanwhile, people woke up to quiet streets after the government announced broad restrictions to try to stop the virus from spreading.
In recent days, India had gradually expanded stay-at-home orders, banned international and domestic flights and suspended passenger service on its extensive rail system until March 31. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s announcement of a three-week countrywide lockdown covering nearly one-fifth of the world’s population triggered panic buying on Tuesday night, but the situation eased after the government issued notices that essential services would be provided.
Read on for a look at what’s happening in Canada, the U.S. and around the world.
Here’s what’s happening in Canada’s provinces and territories
In British Columbia, the top public health official says “no community” in the province is immune from the coronavirus. Dr. Bonnie Henry said there is circulation and risk across the province. Henry also said Tuesday that while case numbers are rising, she doesn’t believe B.C. is on the same trajectory as hard-hit Italy. Read more about what’s happening in B.C.
Officials in Alberta reported a second COVID-19 related death on Tuesday — a woman in her 80s who was living in a Calgary nursing home. “In long-term care and other continuing-care facilities, where some of our most vulnerable citizens reside, we have taken additional measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19,” said Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta’s chief medical officer of health. Read more about what’s happening in Alberta.
Quebec saw another jump in case numbers Tuesday, an increase that’s explained at least in part by extended testing programs, a health expert says. Premier François Legault reminded people that the measures adopted to slow the spread of the virus — the closure of non-essential businesses and schools — are temporary, saying “we are all in this together.” In Montreal, public health officials are investigating after a homeless man who tested positive for COVID-19 was found in a line for food outside a mission. Read more about what’s happening in Quebec.
New Brunswick is stepping up its testing to include people with symptoms — even if they don’t have a travel history. Premier Blaine Higgs has been calling for a “national” plan to deal with the virus. Read more about what’s happening in N.B.
Nova Scotia’s chief medical officer is urging people to be honest about travel history. “People will receive the care they need no matter what their health issue is, but if you do not tell the truth about travel history, we cannot be alerted about the potential for COVID-19 and you’re quite frankly putting other people at risk, especially health-care workers,” said Dr. Robert Strang. Read more about what’s happening in N.S., which has also stepped up testing capacity.
Prince Edward Island’s government is working with a grocery store to offer gift cards to people struggling amid the COVID-19 crisis. The temporary program will give $100 gift cards to workers who are waiting for employment insurance after being laid off. Read more about what’s happening on P.E.I.
Newfoundland and Labrador’s chief medical health officer is reminding people who are sick to stay home — and urging the healthy to do the same barring essential trips. “To those that are healthy and well, unless it is necessary for you to get groceries and other essentials, please stay home,” Dr. Janice Fitzgerald said. Read more about what’s happening in N.L.
From The Associated Press, updated at 6:20 a.m. ET
The White House and Senate leaders of both major political parties announced agreement early Wednesday on unprecedented emergency legislation creating a $2 trillion US pandemic response measure.
Top White House aide Eric Ueland announced the agreement in a Capitol hallway shortly after midnight, capping days of often intense haggling and mounting pressure. The deal still needs to be finalized in detailed legislative language.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are done,” Ueland said. “We have a deal.”
The economic rescue package would give direct payments to most Americans, expand unemployment benefits and provide a $367-billion program for small businesses to keep making payroll while workers are forced to stay home.
One of the last issues to close concerned $500 billion for guaranteed, subsidized loans to larger industries, including a fight over how generous to be with the airlines. Hospitals would get significant help as well.
WATCH | U.S. could become coronavirus epicentre as Trump talks economy:
U.S. President Donald Trump was talking about how soon people could go back to work and restart the economy while the WHO warned the U.S. was likely to become the epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic. 1:56
At the White House on Tuesday, even as the public health crisis deepened, President Donald Trump expressed eagerness to nudge many people back to work in the coming weeks and held out a prospect, based more on hope than science, that the country could be returning to normal in less than a month.
“We have to go back to work, much sooner than people thought,” Trump told a Fox News town hall. He said he’d like to have the country “opened up and just raring to go” by Easter, April 12. But in a White House briefing later, Trump said that “our decision will be based on hard facts and data.”
Medical professionals say social distancing needs to be stepped up, not relaxed, to slow the spread of infections. At the White House briefing, public health authorities said it was particularly important for people in the hard-hit New York City metropolitan area to quarantine themselves for 14 days and for those who have recently left the city to do the same.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said pointedly at the briefing: “No one is going to want to tone down anything when you see what is going on in a place like New York City.”
Light morning traffic is seen on the FDR on Tuesday in New York City, which is dealing with growing case numbers of COVID-19. (Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images)
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has proposed that the Trump administration send thousands of ventilators to New York City — which needs 30,000 of them, he said — and demanded that Trump use wartime authority to force manufacturers to produce them.
Here’s what’s happening in Europe
From Reuters and The Associated Press, updated at 6:30 a.m. ET
Fatalities in Italy surged on Tuesday, dashing hopes the epidemic was easing after more encouraging numbers in the previous two days.
France’s death toll is much higher than the official tally, which only accounts for those dying in hospitals and does not include those dying at home or in retirement homes, the head of the hospitals federation said. France’s Scientific Council has recommended that France’s home confinement, which began one week ago, should last at least six weeks in total. The recommendation was voiced to French President Emmanuel Macron during a special expert meeting on Tuesday.
In the U.K., more than 170,000 people signed up to help the National Health Service, and Parliament is set to suspend sitting for at least four weeks.
A woman sews handmade face masks at a workshop in northern Spain on Tuesday. Spain, like Italy before it, has seen a surge in cases. (Cesar Manso/AFP/Getty Images)
Nurses and doctors demanded action after Spain reported its sharpest daily increase in new cases on Tuesday and said about 14 per cent of the nearly 40,000 infections were among health-care workers.
In contrast to other European countries, Germany offered some hope that it has flattened the exponential spread of the virus, which has infected some 30,000 people. The death toll was relatively low at about 130, and Germany has even taken in patients from France and Italy for treatment.
Russia’s prime minister ordered provincial governors Wednesday to move more quickly to ready hospital beds for coronavirus patients as the outbreak has spread across the vast country. The government reported 658 cases of the novel coronavirus in Russia, up from 495 a day before. That marked a significantly bigger daily increase compared to the previous day, when the number of infections increased by several dozen.
The warning to governors came a day after the mayor of Moscow told Russian President Vladimir Putin that the Russian regions weren’t acting energetically enough to prepare for the outbreak.
WATCH | See why how you wash your hands matters:
Using “glo germ,” a product that shows up under black light, Andrew Chang takes a first-hand look at how germs are transmitted, and how to wash them off our hands effectively. 7:03
Here’s what’s happening elsewhere, including hard-hit Iran and South Korea
From The Associated Press and Reuters, updated at 7:50 a.m. ET
Iran plans to ban Iranian New Year travel and traditional gatherings in parks, President Hassan Rouhani said on Wednesday, as the coronavirus toll rose to 2,077 in the worst-hit country in the Middle East. The total number of reported cases of coronavirus in Iran has climbed to more than 27,000.
Saudi Arabia expanded its curfew hours in the cities of Mecca and Medina, home to Islam’s holiest sites, as well as the capital, Riyadh. Residents now must remain inside their homes from 3 p.m. to 6 a.m. The kingdom also banned travel in or out of the three governorates. Saudi Arabia has reported 676 cases.
South Korea said it plans to provide coronavirus testing materials to the United States in response to President Donald Trump’s request for help. Jeong Eun-kyeong, director of South Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the country is willing to send chemical reagents used to extract genetic material during COVID-19 tests, but at a level that doesn’t affect its own testing capacity.She didn’t provide a detailed estimate on the size of supplies that could be shipped to the United States.
The office of South Korean President Moon Jae-in earlier said Trump during a telephone conversation between the leaders asked whether South Korea could send medical equipment and supplies to help the United States cope with its outbreaks. South Korea is pushing an aggressive test-and-quarantine program that some experts say possibly contributed to its lower death toll in comparison with mainland China and hard-hit European nations. As of Wednesday, South Korea had tested around 358,000 people while reporting 9,137 infections and 126 deaths.
Cases across Africa are now well above 2,400. With Mali, Libya and Guinea-Bissau announcing their first, 46 of the continent’s 54 countries now have the virus. The Portuguese news agency Lusa reported the Guinea-Bissau cases, citing the presidency. Zimbabwe has reported three cases of COVID-19 and recorded its first death this week. Neighboring South Africa’s coronavirus cases jumped again to 709, its health minister said, as the country with the most cases in Africa prepared to go into lockdown first thing Friday.
WATCH | Respirologist talks about community transmission:
There is still a ‘significant risk’ of spreading the novel coronavirus, says Dr. Samir Gupta, associate professor of medicine at the University of Toronto. 10:12
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.
