Two more regions in Ontario are moving into lockdown, the province announced on Friday. As of 12:01 a.m. ET on Monday, York Region and Windsor-Essex will join Toronto and Peel Region in lockdown in order to slow the spread of COVID-19.
The provincial government also said Middlesex-London, Simcoe Muskoka and Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph will move into the red “control” zone. Ontario reported 1,848 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday along with 45 additional deaths.
“Over the last week, public health indicators in the York and Windsor regions have continued to trend in the wrong direction and it is evident additional measures are needed to help limit the spread of the virus,” Dr. David Williams, Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, said in a statement.
Earlier, federal health officials provided updated information and forecasts around the pandemic. Canada is still experiencing high COVID-19 infection rates and the country remains in a “rapid growth” trajectory for cases, Dr. Theresa Tam, the country’s chief public health officer, said as she and other health officials unveiled new modelling data.
WATCH | Dr. Theresa Tam talks about updated COVID-19 modelling for Canada:
Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Tam, updates reporters with the rising number of COVID 19 cases in regions across the country and reveals modeling projections. 0:50
“We need to rapidly reduce the strain on hospitals and our public health systems so that our health workers can keep the pandemic under manageable control” while they also implement a complex vaccination campaign, Tam said.
What’s happening across Canada
As of 3 p.m. ET on Friday, Canada’s COVID-19 case count stood at 446,336, with 73,223 of those cases considered active. A CBC News tally of deaths based on provincial reports, regional health information and CBC’s reporting stood at 13,222.
In Quebec, health officials reported 1,713 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday and 53 additional deaths, bringing the provincial death toll to 7,435. COVID-19 hospitalizations increased to 871, with 123 people in intensive care, according to a provincial dashboard.
The province faced scrutiny Thursday for how its long-term care system handled the first wave of the pandemic. An ombudsperson’s report said Quebec’s long-term care system failed to ensure the safety and dignity of residents as the virus first spread last winter and spring.
In the report, Marie Rinfret said the system was disorganized and unprepared for the surge, with many homes lacking in personal protective equipment and some unable to provide basic care and services.
WATCH | Military arrives in Shamattawa First Nation amid COVID-19 crisis:
A military team has arrived to help deal with the escalating COVID-19 crisis in Shamattawa First Nation in northern Manitoba, where some 300 people have tested positive in a community of about a thousand people. 1:39
In Manitoba, health officials reported 293 new cases of COVID-19 and 13 additional deaths, bringing the provincial death toll to 451.
Dr. Brent Roussin, the province’s chief provincial public health officer, again urged people to follow the rules and not gather for the holidays — saying that case numbers will spike again if people ignore the restrictions.
Tam said Friday that health officials are “beginning to see” the impact of the public health measures put in place in Manitoba.
PUBLIC HEALTH ADVISORY: Five COVID-19 cases identified in Yellowknife. All isolating appropriately. All identified as part of testing call due to wastewater signal. Details at the link. <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/yzf?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#yzf</a> <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/nwtpoli?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#nwtpoli</a> <a href=”https://t.co/qIauzJZlsB”>https://t.co/qIauzJZlsB</a>
New Brunswick reported eight new cases on Friday, along with one more death. Dr. Jennifer Russell, the province’s chief medical officer of health, said the Edmundston region is being moved into the more restrictive “orange” level of restrictions at midnight due to a growing outbreak.
Across the North, Nunavut reported 16 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday. All are in the community of Arviat, bringing the total number of active cases there to 56.
Dr. Kami Kandola, chief public health officer of the Northwest Territories, said in a news release late Thursday five travel-related cases had been reported in Yellowknife.
Yukon reported no new cases on Thursday and had not yet provided an update on Friday.
Saskatchewan reported 324 new cases of COVID-19 and four additional deaths on Thursday, bringing the provincial death toll to 75.
Health Minister Paul Merriman said residents will have to wait until next week to learn what public health orders will be in place over the holidays. He said the Saskatchewan Party government is ultimately responsible for any decisions made, but it works with the chief medical health officer, who presents them with recommendations.
In Alberta, health officials reported 1,566 new cases of COVID-19 on Thursday and 13 additional deaths, bringing the provincial death toll to 666. Hospitalizations stood at 682, with 124 in intensive care units.
Dr. Deena Hinshaw, the chief medical officer of health, said the province completed roughly 16,800 new tests — for a positivity rate of approximately nine per cent.
“The messaging that we are clearly providing to Albertans is our health system is in trouble and we need to work together to save it,” Hinshaw said at a briefing Thursday in response to a question about public health restrictions and whether more needs to be done.
On Thursday, British Columbia reported 28 additional COVID-19 deaths — a single-day high for the province that Dr. Bonnie Henry described as “one of the most tragic days we have had yet.”
Speaking at a briefing on Thursday, the provincial health officer said all but two of the deaths were seniors who were in long-term care homes.
“These are family, these are friends, these are people who have had interesting and challenging lives,” she said as she offered condolences to families and those who lost loved ones.
With the additional deaths, the provincial death toll rose to 587. Hospitalizations stood at 346, with 83 people in critical care on intensive care units.
Henry said the upcoming COVID-19 immunization program is an “important, encouraging milestone” but cautioned that the province is “not yet through this storm.”
The province reported 723 new cases of COVID-19 on Thursday and Henry urged people not to gather beyond households during upcoming religious observances.
What’s happening around the world
From The Associated Press and Reuters, last updated at 2:30 p.m. ET
As of Friday afternoon, more than 69.9 million cases of COVID-19 had been reported worldwide, with more than 45 million of those considered recovered or resolved, according to a tracking tool maintained by Johns Hopkins University. The global death toll stood at more than 1.5 million.
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said nearly a billion doses of vaccines had been secured for the COVAX program to provide shots for poor- and middle-income countries, with 189 countries participating. But several WHO officials noted that it would still take time to manufacture enough doses of vaccines to meet demand.
WATCH | WHO needs $4.3 billion to buy vaccines for poor countries:
The World Health Organization is urging countries to help fill a funding gap of $4.3 billion to help buy COVID-19 vaccines for poor- and middle-income countries. 1:06
AstraZeneca intends to start clinical trials to test a combination of its experimental COVID-19 vaccine with Russia’s Sputnik V shot to see if this can boost the efficacy of the British drugmaker’s vaccine, Russia’s sovereign wealth fund said on Friday. Trials will start by the end of the year and Russia wants to produce the new vaccine jointly if it is proven to be effective, said the RDIF wealth fund, which has funded Sputnik V.
The move is likely to be seen in Moscow as a long-awaited vote of confidence by a Western manufacturer in Sputnik V, which the Russian defence ministry alleged on Friday was the target of a foreign-backed smear campaign. Sputnik’s Russian developers say clinical trials, still under way, have shown it has an efficacy rate of over 90 per cent, higher than that of AstraZeneca’s own vaccine and similar to those of rivals Pfizer and Moderna.
In the Americas, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on Friday pressed U.S. Food and Drug Administration chief Stephen Hahn to grant an emergency use authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine by the end of the day.
The vaccine won approval Thursday from an FDA panel of outside advisers, and sign-off from the FDA is the next step needed to get the shots to the public.
Meadows spoke to Hahn by telephone on Friday, according to a senior official familiar with the call but not authorized to discuss private conversations. Hahn signalled that he would tell regulators to do so, the official said.
President Donald Trump has been pressing for quick approval for the vaccine.
Meanwhile, U.S. land borders with Canada and Mexico will remain closed to non-essential travel until at least Jan. 21 amid a rising number of U.S. coronavirus cases, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said Friday.
The decision means it will be up to the administration of president-elect Joe Biden to determine when it will drop the restrictions, first imposed in March to control the spread of the virus.
Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf said on Twitter the latest one-month extension was to “continue to prevent the spread of COVID.”
In Europe, Denmark will expand lockdown measures announced earlier this week to more cities.
Switzerland has ordered restaurants, bars and shops to close from 7 p.m. across much of the nation.
Meanwhile, calls were growing Friday for tougher lockdown measures in Germany as officials report record daily increases in both coronavirus cases and deaths.
Kim Young Sun, CFO of Korea Superfreeze, sprays water inside an ultra-cold storage facility at the Korea Superfreeze company in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, on Thursday in preparation for vaccines. (Heo Ran/Reuters)
The Robert Koch Institute said the country’s 16 states reported 29,875 new cases of COVID-19, breaking the previous daily record of 23,679 cases reported the day before. The number of deaths from the virus rose by 598, to a total of 20,970. The previous daily record of deaths was 590, set on Wednesday.
In Africa, Nigeria may be on the verge of a second wave of COVID-19 infections, the health minister warned, as another official said the country expects to roll out a vaccine by April next year.
In the Middle East, Bahrain will provide the vaccine for free for all citizens and residents, state news agency BNA reported.
In the Asia-Pacific region, the ability of developing countries in Asia to fight the pandemic got a boost after the Asian Development Bank said it has launched a $9 billion US facility to help nations access and deliver COVID-19 vaccines.
South Korean health officials reported another 689 new coronavirus cases on Friday.
Worker Jan Loested cleans out a shed on Thursday that housed mink at the Semper Avanti mink farm in Moldrup, Denmark. The Danish government ordered a mink cull after hundreds of farms suffered outbreaks of coronavirus. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)
The country is expanding the use of rapid tests and deploying hundreds of police officers and soldiers to help with contact tracing as it deals with its worst surge of coronavirus cases since the early days of the pandemic.
Senior Health Ministry official Yoon Taeho said Friday that rapid antigen tests at emergency rooms, intensive-care units and remote-area hospitals will be covered by national health insurance starting Monday.
In Japan, Economy Minister Yasutoshi Nishimura said he wanted to see the government avoid issuing another state of emergency over the coronavirus.
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.
