On most days you can now find Jen Kuzyk out front of her bakery talking to her customers and laughing.
It’s a ritual that’s developed because of the pandemic.
“I think I love my customers a little bit more now,” Kuzyk admitted with a smile.
Kuzyk owns Edible Options, a gluten-free bakery in St. Catharines, Ont. When the pandemic started, she went from selling hundreds of loaves of bread a day to zero. Even though her bakery was deemed an essential service, she shut down for six weeks because her staff wasn’t comfortable working during the lockdown.
Jen Kuzyk delivered hundreds of loaves of bread to her customers’ homes during the first pandemic lockdown – all free of charge. (Leonardo Palleja/CBC)
“Those were the longest six weeks of my life,” Kuzyk said.
“I won’t lie. I’ve had an hour cry sitting in the middle of my shower not knowing what to do — and the pressure of staff not being together or getting paid, or customers not getting bread. And I knew that I wasn’t alone.”
During those six weeks, as Kuzyk did her best to stay in touch with her customers on social media, she learned how important her bakery was in their lives.
After that, she says she had no choice. Kuzyk says her customers needed her, so she and her husband went to work.
“We would come in here and we would bake hundreds of loaves of bread. And we literally dropped them off at people’s houses. We’d leave the bag at the front door and then we get back in the car. And then we’d call real quick and say: ‘you know, your bread’s outside.'”
Kuzyk and her husband drove hundreds of kilometres to towns all over southern Ontario to deliver their gluten-free bread. They didn’t charge a cent.
Jennifer Kuzyk greets customers as they arrive at her bakery, called Edible Options, in St. Catharines, Ont. 1:18
Ann Potter says that the bread Kuzyk delivered made a huge difference during the lockdown.
“I now think of Jen as more as a friend and a family member than just a place I come to shop,” Potter said. “That she cared enough to provide that to some of us — it gets you right in the feels.”
The result of what Kuzyk did you can now witness outside the bakery, as almost every customer greets her by name and they share a little about their lives.
“I stand in front of the bakery every day because it feels good, feels like where I should be. I want to see every face that comes in that door,” she said.
Karel Peters | Undergraduate, University of Toronto
“COVID hits and the world stops. Literally. School stopped,” said Karel Peters, who is in her final semester at the University of Toronto.
Peters says she will never forget when the school announced it would close.
“We got an email, all of us. It was almost like a movie scene,” she said.
“Everyone looks at their phone at once, and we saw that they were shutting down campus as of that day.”
Karel Peters is an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, finishing a double major in Canadian studies and Equity studies. She’s also the first person in her family to go university. (Nick Purdon/CBC)
Almost a year later, Peters is finishing her double major in Canadian studies and Equity studies, online.
“I didn’t picture it this way,” she said.
“My parents are immigrants and I’m the first in my family to pursue a university education. And so I was really looking forward to a lot of the milestones that come along with that — convocation and getting that diploma and my parents being there,” she said.
Peters’ parents emigrated from Jamaica in the 1980s. Her dad worked as an electrician in Cambridge, Ont. With only a high school education, Peters’ mom worked at the local grocery store.
“My grandmother, who unfortunately I never got to meet, she couldn’t even read. She was illiterate. And my mom, when she came, had to redo her entire high school education because they didn’t count anything that she did in Jamaica as equal to what they had here. And so she would tell me the story every time I’d be frustrated about school or not wanting to do things, just to say, like, ‘I had to work really hard for you to get this. So I want you to put in that effort,'” Peters said.
Karel Peters says her convocation was to be a way of saying thank you for all that her parents have done for her. (Nick Purdon/CBC)
When her mom received her Canadian high school diploma she dreamed of continuing her education to train as a nurse, but once Peters was born she says her mom was forced to put that on hold.
And so Peters says her convocation was to be a way of saying thank you for all that her parents had done.
“I feel a lot of guilt when I think about the fact that I’m sad over not getting to have convocation, when there are people dying every day, when we’re in the middle of a global pandemic. But convocation for me isn’t small, because it’s not just for me, it’s for my family,” she said.
Sometimes it isn’t until something is taken away that we realize how important it is. And Peters says the pandemic has taught her how much her graduation means for her family.
“It means everything they went through. Everything they did to get me to this moment was worth it. And I guess despite the chaos that’s happening, it still does mean something.”
Dr. Javed Alloo | Family physician, Toronto
“A year ago when COVID first came to Canada, I was terrified. I was worried that people were going to die,” said Dr. Javed Alloo.
The Toronto-based family physician understood better than most the dangers of the COVID-19 virus. He got his start in medicine during the SARS epidemic in 2003, and Alloo’s first job out of medical school was in a clinic where the doctor had just died after he’d contracted the disease from a patient.
The experience made him fearful of the COVID-19 virus from the outset.
“I’m still worried that people are going to die in preventable ways,” he said.
Family physician Dr. Javed Alloo runs a clinic in a Toronto neighbourhood with one of the highest rates of COVID-19 infections in the country. (Nick Purdon/CBC)
COVID-19 is a reality that Dr. Alloo faces every day. His clinic is in a neighbourhood with one of the highest rates of the virus in the country.
“In many ways, I think the pandemic has been a truth serum,” he said. “It has actually uncovered the truths and faults and gaps in our health care system. And we’ve had the chance now to try to address those challenges, because we can’t ignore them anymore.”
One of the gaps Dr. Alloo worries about is that with the focus on COVID, people with other illnesses will fall through the cracks. He has fundamentally changed his practice to prevent that.
Early on in the pandemic he worked hard to get consent from his patients so that he could include other professionals on their online medical visits.
“I now include not just the patient themselves, but their daughter who lives in a different city, their pharmacists, their social worker who might see them once in a while,” he said. “And we all talk together about what needs to be done for care.
“I think for my most vulnerable patients, my care has gotten a lot stronger and better because we’re working together as a team, as a community to support patients who need it most.”
Dr. Javed Alloo says his care for his most vulnerable patients has actually gotten better during the pandemic. (Nick Purdon/CBC)
Alloo is concerned that when the pandemic is over, doctors will revert to the old ways of doing things and the COVID-inspired innovations will be lost.
“My biggest worry after the pandemic is they’ll go back to the old ways, that they will actually insist on making people trek across cities to get to a medical visit. That they will actually not look for ways of involving the patients and families in their care in an ongoing way,” he said.
Domenico Saxida | Former construction worker
Saxida is 56 and has lived in a park in downtown Toronto for the past year.
“My dad got COVID from the retirement home that my sisters put him in. He was 84, I believe. He just finished battling cancer,” Saxida said.
“He didn’t deserve to die like that. Alone.”
Saxida couldn’t save his father, but ever since he moved into the park he’s tried to help others.
Domenico Saxida says the pandemic has brought kindness to the park where he lives. He’s seen a steady stream of people give residents food and clothing, something that didn’t happen often before COVID-19. (Nick Purdon/CBC)
In that time he says he’s witnessed more and more people move onto the streets, because several of Toronto’s shelters have had COVID-19 outbreaks.
“I just put this tent up today for a guy that came in yesterday,” he said proudly.
Inside his own shelter, a mixture of tents and semi-permanent plywood structures that can sleep six people, Saxida says he keeps naloxone kits in case someone overdoses.
“I decided to do something positive and build something so I can help other people while I’m out here. Because a lot of people have helped me since I’ve been out here when I had nothing, nothing, just a suitcase with a couple of pairs of clothes in it,” he said.
One thing COVID-19 has demonstrated is how people living in precarious conditions become even more vulnerable during a pandemic.
A recent study published in the Canadian medical association journal, for example, shows that people who experience homelessness have higher rates of hospitalization and death because of the virus than the general population.
Saxida says the pandemic has made living on the street harder than ever. Most businesses are closed, for example, so simple things like finding a place to go to the bathroom can be incredibly difficult and time-consuming.
Domenico Saxida shows and describes the tents and boxes where he lives in Alexandra Park in Toronto. 0:43
Still, Saxida says there’s an upside to the crisis.
“The positive thing that’s come out of this is that the public knows what’s going on out here,” he said.
“The government can’t hide it anymore … the government’s reluctancy to build affordable housing,” Saxida said, waving his hands to point out the 30 or so tents in the park where he now lives.
“This is the result. And the pandemic has brought it to light.”
The pandemic has also brought kindness, Saxida says. He thanks the steady stream of people who come to the park and give the residents food and clothing — something that happened much less before COVID-19.
Since the pandemic started about a year ago all, Canadians have been forced to adapt and change to some degree. When the pandemic is over, perhaps some of those changes will be worth keeping.
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.
