Public health officials say 33 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus have been diagnosed in Canada so far, with 20 cases reported in Ontario, 12 in British Columbia and one in Quebec.
Here is a timeline of cases in this country.
Jan. 25, 2020: A man in his 50s who arrived in Toronto from Wuhan, China, the epicentre of the outbreak, becomes the first “presumptive” case of the new coronavirus in Canada. The man called 911 as soon as he got sick with relatively minor symptoms and was placed in isolation in Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital.
Jan. 26, 2020: The wife of the Toronto man who was Canada’s first “presumptive” case of the new coronavirus becomes the second presumptive case. The woman is kept in home isolation.
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Jan. 27, 2020: The National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg confirms that a man in quarantine in Sunnybrook Hospital is Canada’s first documented case of the new coronavirus.
Jan. 28, 2020: Health authorities confirm Canada’s second case of the novel coronavirus. The woman had recently travelled to Wuhan with her husband, who was the first case confirmed in Canada.
2:24 TTC, GO Transit roll out cleaning measures to prevent spread of COVID-19
TTC, GO Transit roll out cleaning measures to prevent spread of COVID-19
Jan. 28, 2020: Health officials in British Columbia say a man in his 40s is presumed to have the new coronavirus and is doing well as he recovers at his Vancouver home. B.C.’s health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, says the man often works in China and voluntarily isolated himself upon returning to Canada.
Jan. 28, 2020: The presumed case of the new strain of coronavirus in B.C. is confirmed by the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.
Jan. 31, 2020: Toronto man hospitalized with the novel coronavirus is well enough to go home. Sunnybrook Hospital says he’ll continue to recover at home, where his wife is also in self-isolation.
Jan. 31, 2020: Ontario’s third case of the new coronavirus is confirmed. The patient, a woman in her 20s, had travelled to the affected area in China. The London university student initially tested negative for the virus, but a subsequent test at the national lab in Winnipeg was positive. Health officials say her symptoms are minor.
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Feb. 4, 2020: Health officials announce another presumptive confirmed case in B.C. Henry says the woman had family visiting from China’s Hubei province and she is in isolation at her home.
Feb. 5, 2020: British Columbia’s second case of coronavirus is confirmed by the National Microbiology Lab.
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Businesses cut travel over COVID-19
Feb. 6, 2020: Henry announces two new cases of COVID-19 in B.C., noting both people were in the same household as the woman diagnosed with the province’s second case.
Feb. 12, 2020: Ontario health officials say the woman from London, Ont., no longer has the novel coronavirus in her system. It marks the first time a case of the illness has been resolved in Canada.
Feb. 14, 2020: Officials in B.C. announce the province’s fifth case of COVID-19. The woman in her 30s who lives in B.C.’s Interior recently returned from Hubei province.
Feb. 19, 2020: Henry announces that the person diagnosed with B.C.’s first case of the new coronavirus has recovered. It’s the first time this has happened in the province.
Feb. 20, 2020: A woman who recently returned from Iran is diagnosed with British Columbia’s sixth case of COVID-19. She’s the first person in the country diagnosed with the illness who did not recently visit China. Meanwhile, in Ontario, the man who had Canada’s first case of the virus is cleared after testing negative for the illness twice in 24 hours.
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Feb. 21, 2020: A third case of coronavirus in Ontario is resolved.
Feb. 23, 2020: Officials in Toronto announce Ontario has a new case of coronavirus — the fourth to be diagnosed in the province. The woman arrived in Toronto from China several days earlier.
3:17 ‘I’m asking all British Columbians: stay home’: Dr. Bonnie Henry on COVID-19 crisis
‘I’m asking all British Columbians: stay home’: Dr. Bonnie Henry on COVID-19 crisis
Feb. 24, 2020: Henry announces a seventh person in B.C. has been diagnosed with the new coronavirus. The man in his 40s was in close contact with the woman who has the province’s sixth case of the illness.
Feb. 26, 2020: Ontario officials announce a fifth diagnosis in the province: a woman in her 60s who recently travelled to Iran.
Feb. 27, 2020: Quebec public health officials report the province’s first presumptive case, a woman from the Montreal region who recently returned from Iran. Ontario officials also confirm a sixth case of COVID-19 in the province. They say the man in his 60s is the husband of Ontario’s fifth patient with the virus.
Feb. 28, 2020: Ontario reports a seventh confirmed case — a man in his 50s who had travelled to Iran. The man arrived in Toronto on Tuesday, Feb. 25 and went to the emergency department of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre the next day. It also reports its eighth case: a man in his 80s with a travel history to Egypt. Officials said he arrived in the city on Feb. 20 and went to the Scarborough Health Network’s General Hospital’s emergency department on Thursday.
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Feb. 29, 2020: Health officials in British Columbia say a woman in her 60s who travelled from Iran is the eighth case of COVID-19 in the province. Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry says the woman has a relatively mild case and she is in self-isolation at home. Health officials in Ontario report another three cases — two women who had recently made separate trips to Iran, and the 69-year-old husband of one of those women, who had no recent travel history.
March 1, 2020: Ontario officials diagnose four new cases — three in York Region and one in Toronto. All four patients had recently travelled abroad. One had travelled to Egypt with a man who was later diagnosed with the virus, while the rest had recently been in Iran.
2:49 Tips for avoiding community transmission of COVID-19
Tips for avoiding community transmission of COVID-19
March 2, 2020: Ontario announces three new cases — two women who had travelled to Egypt and a man who had travelled to Iran.
March 3, 2020: Ontario announces two new cases — one person who had travelled to Egypt and another who had travelled to Iran. British Columbia announces four new cases involving people with links to travel from Iran. Officials in B.C. are also asking travellers from China and Iran to isolate themselves for 14 days when they return home to Canada.
MILWAUKEE (AP) — Whooping cough is at its highest level in a decade for this time of year, U.S. health officials reported Thursday.
There have been 18,506 cases of whooping cough reported so far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. That’s the most at this point in the year since 2014, when cases topped 21,800.
The increase is not unexpected — whooping cough peaks every three to five years, health experts said. And the numbers indicate a return to levels before the coronavirus pandemic, when whooping cough and other contagious illnesses plummeted.
Still, the tally has some state health officials concerned, including those in Wisconsin, where there have been about 1,000 cases so far this year, compared to a total of 51 last year.
Nationwide, CDC has reported that kindergarten vaccination rates dipped last year and vaccine exemptions are at an all-time high. Thursday, it released state figures, showing that about 86% of kindergartners in Wisconsin got the whooping cough vaccine, compared to more than 92% nationally.
Whooping cough, also called pertussis, usually starts out like a cold, with a runny nose and other common symptoms, before turning into a prolonged cough. It is treated with antibiotics. Whooping cough used to be very common until a vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, which is now part of routine childhood vaccinations. It is in a shot along with tetanus and diphtheria vaccines. The combo shot is recommended for adults every 10 years.
“They used to call it the 100-day cough because it literally lasts for 100 days,” said Joyce Knestrick, a family nurse practitioner in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Whooping cough is usually seen mostly in infants and young children, who can develop serious complications. That’s why the vaccine is recommended during pregnancy, to pass along protection to the newborn, and for those who spend a lot of time with infants.
But public health workers say outbreaks this year are hitting older kids and teens. In Pennsylvania, most outbreaks have been in middle school, high school and college settings, an official said. Nearly all the cases in Douglas County, Nebraska, are schoolkids and teens, said Justin Frederick, deputy director of the health department.
That includes his own teenage daughter.
“It’s a horrible disease. She still wakes up — after being treated with her antibiotics — in a panic because she’s coughing so much she can’t breathe,” he said.
It’s important to get tested and treated with antibiotics early, said Dr. Kris Bryant, who specializes in pediatric infectious diseases at Norton Children’s in Louisville, Kentucky. People exposed to the bacteria can also take antibiotics to stop the spread.
“Pertussis is worth preventing,” Bryant said. “The good news is that we have safe and effective vaccines.”
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AP data journalist Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
How a sperm and egg fuse together has long been a mystery.
New research by scientists in Austria provides tantalizing clues, showing fertilization works like a lock and key across the animal kingdom, from fish to people.
“We discovered this mechanism that’s really fundamental across all vertebrates as far as we can tell,” said co-author Andrea Pauli at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna.
The team found that three proteins on the sperm join to form a sort of key that unlocks the egg, allowing the sperm to attach. Their findings, drawn from studies in zebrafish, mice, and human cells, show how this process has persisted over millions of years of evolution. Results were published Thursday in the journal Cell.
Scientists had previously known about two proteins, one on the surface of the sperm and another on the egg’s membrane. Working with international collaborators, Pauli’s lab used Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence tool AlphaFold — whose developers were awarded a Nobel Prize earlier this month — to help them identify a new protein that allows the first molecular connection between sperm and egg. They also demonstrated how it functions in living things.
It wasn’t previously known how the proteins “worked together as a team in order to allow sperm and egg to recognize each other,” Pauli said.
Scientists still don’t know how the sperm actually gets inside the egg after it attaches and hope to delve into that next.
Eventually, Pauli said, such work could help other scientists understand infertility better or develop new birth control methods.
The work provides targets for the development of male contraceptives in particular, said David Greenstein, a genetics and cell biology expert at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study.
The latest study “also underscores the importance of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry,” he said in an email.
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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.
Patients who are older, don’t speak English, and don’t have a high school education are more likely to experience harm during a hospital stay in Canada, according to new research.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information measured preventableharmful events from 2023 to 2024, such as bed sores and medication errors,experienced by patients who received acute care in hospital.
The research published Thursday shows patients who don’t speak English or French are 30 per cent more likely to experience harm. Patients without a high school education are 20 per cent more likely to endure harm compared to those with higher education levels.
The report also found that patients 85 and older are five times more likely to experience harm during a hospital stay compared to those under 20.
“The goal of this report is to get folks thinking about equity as being a key dimension of the patient safety effort within a hospital,” says Dana Riley, an author of the report and a program lead on CIHI’s population health team.
When a health-care provider and a patient don’t speak the same language, that can result in the administration of a wrong test or procedure, research shows. Similarly, Riley says a lower level of education is associated with a lower level of health literacy, which can result in increased vulnerability to communication errors.
“It’s fairly costly to the patient and it’s costly to the system,” says Riley, noting the average hospital stay for a patient who experiences harm is four times more expensive than the cost of a hospital stay without a harmful event – $42,558 compared to $9,072.
“I think there are a variety of different reasons why we might start to think about patient safety, think about equity, as key interconnected dimensions of health-care quality,” says Riley.
The analysis doesn’t include data on racialized patients because Riley says pan-Canadian data was not available for their research. Data from Quebec and some mental health patients was also excluded due to differences in data collection.
Efforts to reduce patient injuries at one Ontario hospital network appears to have resulted in less harm. Patient falls at Mackenzie Health causing injury are down 40 per cent, pressure injuries have decreased 51 per cent, and central line-associated bloodstream infections, such as IV therapy, have been reduced 34 per cent.
The hospital created a “zero harm” plan in 2019 to reduce errors after a hospital survey revealed low safety scores. They integrated principles used in aviation and nuclear industries, which prioritize safety in complex high-risk environments.
“The premise is first driven by a cultural shift where people feel comfortable actually calling out these events,” says Mackenzie Health President and Chief Executive Officer Altaf Stationwala.
They introduced harm reduction training and daily meetings to discuss risks in the hospital. Mackenzie partnered with virtual interpreters that speak 240 languages and understand medical jargon. Geriatric care nurses serve the nearly 70 per cent of patients over the age of 75, and staff are encouraged to communicate as frequently as possible, and in plain language, says Stationwala.
“What we do in health care is we take control away from patients and families, and what we know is we need to empower patients and families and that ultimately results in better health care.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
