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For many Canadians, being safe this holiday season means being apart from family – CBC.ca

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There’s a caveat in the popular holiday standard I’ll Be Home for Christmas — “if only in my dreams” — and it’s taken on additional meaning as many people prepare to spend the holidays apart from family.

With COVID-19 case numbers rising across the country and a province-wide lockdown in Ontario coming into effect Saturday, returning to one’s hometown to see family and friends is an unlikely and unadvisable prospect.

Across the country, public health experts have urged Canadians to to limit — or even avoid — large Christmas get-togethers this year to avoid spreading the novel coronavirus. That’s caused anxiety for some who’ve had to make difficult phone calls to parents and loved ones to say they won’t be home.

This Christmas is the first that some young people won’t spend at home. Their families say they understand, given the severity of the pandemic. Some have tried to mitigate the disappointment by sending care packages and presents. Others have made elaborate plans for Dec. 25 phone calls and virtual reunions.

Mollie Roy, a 25-year-old who’s staying in Vancouver instead of returning to her Ottawa hometown, admits she felt tempted as she saw people risk a reunion and go home. She was away from home last Christmas due to work, but this year felt different.

“You see other people doing it and you’re like, ‘Well, why shouldn’t I do it if other people are doing it?’ But that’s not really the right attitude, I don’t think, to have at this time of year in general and just about this whole pandemic,” said Roy, who works jobs in the restaurant industry as well as remotely as an office manager.

“Once I made the concrete decision, there was almost relief and just peace.”

She feels fortunate her family is healthy and that she can spend Christmas in Vancouver with her roommate and boyfriend. Roy is in contact with her family and friends in Ottawa, and will reach out to them during the holidays.

Roy said she’ll be spending the holidays in her self-described ‘Christmas palace’ in Vancouver. (Submitted by Mollie Roy)

The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) said the safest way to celebrate “is with members of your immediate household” and urged Canadians to check with their local health authorities for additional guidance. Each province and territory has its own rules and limits on indoor gatherings, and many have allowances for people who live on their own to have contact with another household.

Dr. Ami Rokach, a clinical psychologist in Toronto, said this holiday season is particularly difficult because of many people’s expectations that this time of year means spending time with family — and restrictions that are still in place after nearly a year disrupt that.

Rokach, who also teaches in the psychology department at York University, recommends people use this time to focus on their individual well-being and to shift their perception.

“Not being able to be with people that you really want to be with doesn’t mean that you need to be lonely,” he said. Technological advances and safe gatherings can “provide us kind of a bridge to a better time,” he added.

WATCH | Psychiatrists discuss coping with being apart during the holidays:

Two psychiatrists answer viewer questions about staying mentally healthy while being isolated during the pandemic over the holidays, including how to cope with isolation and how students can balance added screen time from online schooling. 6:58

Far from home, but still connected

Seb Rocca, a 21-year-old political science student at McMaster University in Hamilton, won’t be returning to England for the holidays. He hasn’t seen his family in nearly a year.

When he left for Canada, his mother urged him to come home for Christmas. But lockdown concerns and fears of not being able to return due to flight cancellations meant he’ll be apart from family at Christmas for the first time. Even if he did decide to return, recently imposed travel restrictions between Canada and the U.K. due to a new variant of the coronavirus would have impacted any plans.

Seb Rocca said his mother mailed him a Christmas care-package from England to make sure he still felt connected to his family during the holidays. (Submitted by Seb Rocca)

Rocca will be spending Christmas with his girlfriend and her parents just outside Hamilton. In advance of this visit, he said he self-isolated as a precautionary measure.

His family in England have gone above and beyond to make him feel at home. His mother sent a stocking, a tree ornament and cards from various members of his family.

“I love my family a lot. They try very hard to make sure that I’m OK,” Rocca said.

He hopes he’ll be able to see his family for graduation in the spring — and he knows exactly what he’ll do then.

“Hug them like it was the last thing I can do on Earth,” he said. “Whether it’s in England or Canada, I just want to hug my family.”

Seb Rocca, left, sits beside his brother Dom during a family visit in 2019. Rocca hasn’t seen his family in nearly a year due to the pandemic. (Submitted by Seb Rocca)

New traditions out of necessity

Christmas is a big deal for Annabel Thornton’s family. Her family moved to Victoria from the United Kingdom when she was five, and the holidays have consistently been when the four of them could be together.

But Thornton, who’s now working on her Ph.D in economics at the University of Toronto, recognized last spring that returning to Vancouver Island during the holidays might be difficult due to the pandemic.

The 24-year-old was able to visit her family in B.C. during the summer. Her boyfriend also returned from Halifax, where he attends university, in mid-November. The two will spend the holidays together at their Toronto apartment.

Annabel Thornton won’t be doing her traditional Christmas Day walk with her family in Victoria this year, but there are still plans for her family to connect for the holiday while she stays in Toronto. (Submitted by Annabel Thornton)

“I have a really good support network in Toronto, thankfully, so I have a lot of friends and I have a lot of people I can talk to,” Thornton said about how she’s handled living on her own for parts of the pandemic. “But it’s definitely hard not seeing [family] at this time of year.”

In lieu of the traditional Christmas Day nature walks and extended pyjama time, her mother has organized a “Zoom murder-mystery” so the extended family can still connect during the holiday.

“We’re just trying to make the best of a sub par situation,” Thornton said.

‘Christmas is a really big thing in my family,’ said Thornton, adding that personalized stockings and extended pyjama time on Christmas morning are part of how her family usually celebrates the holiday.  (Submitted by Annabel Thornton)

A time to be thankful

Eric Laing, 22, feels fortunate to have spent most of the pandemic near family. He spent the summer at home in Peterborough, Ont., with his mom, then moved to Vancouver in September to start work as an accounting associate.

Laing, who lives with his brother in Vancouver, is staying in B.C. for the holidays. Their family was supportive of the decision, with some members particularly appreciative that the brothers wouldn’t be putting themselves at risk of exposure during the cross-country flight.

Eric Laing, second from right, said his family was understanding when he decided not to return home for the holidays this year. (Submitted by Eric Laing)

Laing relished being able to go for walks and bike rides with family and friends during the summer in Peterborough, and he and his brother spent the fall hiking and going to the beach. He said that, combined with Zoom and FaceTime calls with his mother, helped keep the feelings of isolation at bay.

“It would be really nice to see the rest of my family for the holidays as we have for so many years,” Laing said. “But I’m really just feeling grateful to be able to spend it with my brother at least.”

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STD epidemic slows as new syphilis and gonorrhea cases fall in US

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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.

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World’s largest active volcano Mauna Loa showed telltale warning signs before erupting in 2022

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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.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Waymo’s robotaxis now open to anyone who wants a driverless ride in Los Angeles

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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.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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