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Are Canadian hospitals prepared for another COVID surge? What experts say

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Over the last couple of years, Canada has been through several COVID-19 waves that have extensively strained the country’s health-care system. And now, with the number of confirmed cases of the new XBB.1.5 subvariant on the rise, concerns are growing over the preparedness of hospitals should there be more waves.

Dr. Melissa Yuan-Innes, emergency physician at the Hôpital Glengarry Memorial Hospital in Alexandria, Ont., said that their hospital isn’t preparing for another wave in any “special way,” simply because there isn’t room in the health-care system for a surge in cases.

“We don’t have the capacity. Our health-care system is starting to look like a set of dominos that you’re starting to knock over,” she told Global News.

 

‘We don’t have any magic’

“People call the hospital the first line of defense. We’re actually the last line of defense. We’re there if everything else fails. So, we’re asking you to do your part,” said Yuan-Innes.

To avoid a surge, Glengarry Memorial hospital staff are continuing to wear personal protective equipment and the vast majority of them are vaccinated, according to Yuan-Innes.

But they are still short-staffed, she said.



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New Brunswick company helping Canada’s airports test wastewater for COVID-19

 


“It’s not a question of do we have enough experience with it, it’s do we have enough personnel,” she said. “And we don’t.

“We want you to stay healthy and you want to stay healthy,” she added. “So please don’t count on the system. We don’t have any magic.

“Vaccination is the best step to take here because it makes your body recognize the disease instead of having to start from scratch,” Yuan-Innes said.

Hospitals have been battered with numerous waves of the coronavirus over the last three years, but according to Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious diseases specialist at Toronto General Hospital, upcoming waves, if any, won’t impact the health-care system the same way they previously did.

And that is because “we have two things going for us,” he told Global News.

“One is pretty high rates of vaccination.”

“But on top of that, we can’t ignore that a significant portion of our population has been infected and recovered from infection. When you combine recovery from infection with vaccination, it’s what’s called hybrid immunity and you have some pretty robust protection at the community level,” Bogoch explained.

“We’ve sort of been there, done that.”

Moreover, the XBB.1.5 subvariant that has already been found in 35 countries around the world isn’t spreading as fast as was first thought, he said.

“It’s still growing and still expanding, but at a smaller rate,” he added.

However, it’s still important to acknowledge that the subvariant is around in Canada and there is still a lot of uncertainty, he said.

 

Another COVID wave ‘might happen’

As of Jan. 9, the total number of XBB.1.5 cases in Canada sat at 42, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC).

This was double the number of confirmed cases reported from the week before.

“It’s important to never sweep anything under the rug,” Bogoch said. “We’ve dealt with some really, really challenging waves. That might happen again.”

According to Dr. Brian Conway, medical director of the Vancouver Infectious Diseases Centre in British Columbia, the subvariant could likely become the dominant variant in Canada soon, especially given how rapidly it’s spreading in the United States and Asia.

“It may spread more easily, it may attach to cells more easily, it may not be as susceptible to protection by vaccination as the original Omicron (variant) or as some of the other variants, so we need to keep an eye on this going forward,” he told Global News.

With concern about long COVID is still present, Conway added that there’s reason to be more cautious. The greater number of times someone becomes sick with the virus, the more susceptible they become to long COVID, he said.

“So, if someone has had their vaccines, two vaccines let’s say, maybe even three,” Conway recommended that they get their bivalent boosters “as soon as they are able to.”

“I’d strongly encourage you to do so,” he said.

So far this year, some provinces have already seen an uptick in COVID-19 hospitalizations.

In Ontario, hospitals in Ottawa and Kitchener saw a record number of patients admitted this week. Factors at play range from respiratory illness to slips and falls commonly seen this time of year.

In a statement released last week, Queensway Carleton said it cared for 361 patients in a day. In Kitchener, Ont., Grand River Hospital said it cared for 295 patients in its emergency room in one day last week.

In provinces like British Columbia, however, cases of hospitalization have fallen, despite test positivity being up throughout the province. As of Jan. 5, there were 356 positive cases in hospital, down from 386 on Friday. The number of cases in critical care also fell from 34 to 25.

In Alberta, COVID hospitalizations have seen a post-holiday dip as well. Data spanning from Jan. 5 to Jan. 9 noted 878 people in hospital — 34 fewer than the previous reporting period. ICU admissions dropped by nine, to 31.

–With files from Global News’ Aya Al-Hakim & Amy Judd

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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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