Melanie Fournier went to bed a week ago Thursday feeling grateful that, despite everything going on in the world, she was in the best health of her life.
Less than 12 hours later, the 42-year-old Montreal-area woman was racked with coughs that left her gasping for breath and was burning up with fever.
“I woke up with a little scratch in my throat and started trying to cough it up,” she said in a phone interview.
“Within 20 minutes I had a full-blown fever, I was hacking up my lungs and it hit me: I need help.”
Fournier, who works in health and social services, is one of the thousands of Canadians who have been diagnosed with COVID-19.
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She and several other Canadians have shared their stories with The Canadian Press in order to demystify the illness and to urge the public to respect physical distancing measures.
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In the days following the onset of her symptoms, Fournier felt panic creeping in as she struggled to get through to anyone on Montreal’s hotlines, which constantly disconnected her. Later, she had to fight to get tested since she hadn’t travelled recently and didn’t know who infected her.
Since her test came back positive last Monday, Fournier has struggled with burning lung pain, a cough and fever, and “body aches and pains worse than any flu I’ve ever had.”
But even worse, she said, was the fear and isolation she felt after being left to fight a serious illness at home, with little advice beyond take Tylenol, rest and drink fluids and call 911 if she couldn’t breathe.
“It’s scary going through this by myself,” she said.
Kyla Lee, a 33-year-old lawyer from Vancouver, takes issue with those who claim COVID-19 is no more than a bad flu.
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Lee, who has no underlying health conditions, says she fell ill a few days after returning from a conference in Ohio and was diagnosed as a presumptive case by a doctor after she began experiencing a fever, fatigue and a deep cough.
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The busy lawyer, who rarely pauses in her day and has never taken more than a day or two off for any illness, said that even nearly a week later, on her bad days she’s left gasping for breath on the edge of her bed after just a couple of phone calls.
“The breathing is the big difference,” she said in a phone interview last week.
“It’s like my lungs have sacks of rice around them, so when I take a deep breath I feel pressure.”
Both Lee and Fournier decided to go public with their symptoms to show that even healthy young people with no underlying conditions are not immune and to help others who are worried about themselves or loved ones.
“It’s an incredibly alienating virus,” Fournier said.
“There’s shame associated with it,” she added. “How many people did I infect? Did I infect somebody? Will I cause somebody to die?”
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At 61 years old, both Julien Bergeron and Manon Trudel are in an age demographic that is more prone to complications than either Lee or Fournier.
But the Montreal-area couple, who contracted COVID-19 aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship in February, say the mental aspect of the journey was far worse than the physical.
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The couple had to endure weeks of confinement in their windowless room on the ship docked in Yokohama, with instructions constantly blaring on the loudspeaker and and endless stream of personnel knocking at the door.
Trudel, who has a background in workplace health and safety, knew the proper quarantine procedures weren’t being followed, which added to the stress.
She began asking for protective gear and lobbying Canadian officials and eventually the media, doing interviews from inside their room’s tiny bathroom to avoid the sounds of the couple fighting next door from filtering through the ship’s thin walls.
Bergeron was told he’d tested positive on Feb. 18, Trudel a few days later. She had no symptoms, while he experienced lung pain and fatigue due to pneumonia but said it was no worse than his previous bouts.
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The 22 days Bergeron spent in hospital were the longest the couple has spent apart in 25 years.
“It was very, very hard mentally,” Bergeron said.
Now that they’re home, the couple say they’re worried that Quebec doesn’t seem to be taking the virus as seriously as Japan, where they say those who tested postive were immediately put in hospitals or other facilities away from the public.
LANGLEY, B.C. – Police in Langley, B.C., say one person is dead in a crash between a car and a motorcycle on Highway 1 that shut down the route for hours.
Mounties say their initial investigation indicates both vehicles were travelling east when they collided shortly before 4:20 a.m. near 240 Street on the highway.
The motorcycle rider died from their injuries.
Highway 1 was closed for a long stretch through Langley for about 11 hours while police investigated.
RCMP say their integrated collision analysis reconstruction team went to the scene.
The Mounties are asking anyone who witnessed the crash or who may have dash-camera footage from the area to call them.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 19, 2024.
WINNIPEG – A court has been asked to declare Lake Winnipeg a person with constitutional rights to life, liberty and security of person in a case that may go further than any other in trying to establish the rights of nature in Canada.
“It really is that simple,” said Grand Chief Jerry Daniels of the Manitoba Southern Chiefs’ Organization, which filed the suit Thursday in Court of King’s Bench in Winnipeg.
“The lake has its own rights. The lake is a living being.”
The argument is being used to help force the provincial government to conduct an environmental assessment of how Manitoba Hydro regulates lake levels for power generation. Those licences come up for renewal in August 2026, and the chiefs argue that the process under which those licences were granted was outdated and inadequate.
They quote Manitoba’s Clean Environment Commission, which said in 2015 that the licences were granted on the basis of poor science, poor consultation and poor public accountability.
Meanwhile, the statement of claim says “the (plaintiffs) describe the lake’s current state as being so sick that she is dying.”
It describes a long list of symptoms.
Fish species have disappeared, declined, migrated or become sick and inedible, the lawsuit says. Birds and wildlife including muskrat, beavers, duck, geese, eagles and gulls are vanishing from the lake’s wetlands.
Foods and traditional medicines — weekay, bulrush, cattail, sturgeon and wild rice — are getting harder to find, the document says, and algae blooms and E. coli bacteria levels have increased.
Invasive species including zebra mussels and spiny water fleas are now common, the document says.
“In Anishinaabemowin, the (plaintiffs) refer to the water in Lake Winnipeg as moowaakamiim (the water is full of feces) or wiinaagamin (the water is polluted, dirty and full of garbage),” the lawsuit says.
It blames many of the problems on Manitoba Hydro’s management of the lake waters to prevent it flushing itself clean every year.
“She is unable to go through her natural cleansing cycle and becomes stagnant and struggles to sustain other beings like animals, birds, fish, plants and people,” the document says.
The defendants, Manitoba Hydro and the provincial government, have not filed statements of defence. Both declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Daniels said it makes sense to consider the vast lake — one of the world’s largest — as alive.
“We’re living in an era of reconciliation, there’s huge changes in the mindsets of regular Canadians and science has caught up a lot in understanding. It’s not a huge stretch to understand the lake as a living entity.”
The idea has been around in western science since the 1970s. The Gaia hypothesis, which remains highly disputed, proposed the Earth is a single organism with its own feedback loops that regulate conditions and keep them favourable to life.
The courts already recognize non-human entities such as corporations as persons.
Personhood has also been claimed for two Canadian rivers.
Quebec’s Innu First Nation have claimed that status for the Magpie River, and the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in Alberta is seeking standing for the Athabasca River in regulatory hearings. The Magpie’s status hasn’t been tested in court and Alberta’s energy regulator has yet to rule on the Athabasca.
Matt Hulse, a lawyer who argued the Athabasca River should be treated as a person, noted the Manitoba lawsuit quotes the use of “everyone” in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
“The term ‘everyone’ isn’t defined, which could help (the chiefs),” he said.
But the Charter typically focuses on individual rights, Hulse added.
“What they’re asking for is substantive rights to be given to a lake. What does ‘liberty’ mean to a lake?
“Those kinds of cases require a bit of a paradigm shift. I think the Southern Chiefs Organization will face an uphill battle.”
Hulse said the Manitoba case goes further than any he’s aware of in seeking legal rights for a specific environment.
Daniels said he believes the courts and Canadians are ready to recognize humans are not separate from the world in which they live and that the law should recognize that.
“We need to understand our lakes and our environment as something we have to live in cohesion with.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 19, 2024.
OTTAWA – MPs on the public safety and national security committee voted unanimously to launch an investigation into an alleged Russian ploy to dupe right-wing influencers into sowing division among Americans.
A U.S. indictment filed earlier this month charged two employees of RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet, in a US$10-million scheme that purportedly used social media personalities to distribute content with Russian government messaging.
While not explicitly mentioned in court documents, the details match up with Tenet Media, founded by Canadian Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, who is identified as her husband on social media.
The committee will invite Chen and Donovan to testify on the matter, as well as Lauren Southern, who is among the Tenet cast of personalities.
The motion, which was brought forward by Liberal MP Pam Damoff and passed on Thursday, also seeks to invite civil society representatives and disinformation experts on the matter.
Court documents allege the Russians created a fake investor who provided money to the social media company to hire the influencers, paying the founders significant fees, including through a company account in Canada.
The U.S. Justice Department doesn’t allege any wrongdoing by the influencers.
Following the indictment, YouTube removed several channels associated with Chen, including the Tenet Media channel.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 19, 2024.
