Ottawa uncertain if Moderna shortage will impact Indigenous vaccine rollout.
Ontario reports 1,670 new cases of COVID-19 as test positivity rate dips to lowest in months.
U.S. Senate passes budget plan to advance Biden’s $1.9-trillion US COVID aid package.
Israel plans to begin slowly easing its latest coronavirus lockdown on Sunday.
Have a question about the coronavirus pandemic? Send your question to COVID@cbc.ca.
The U.S. House of Representatives approved a budget package on Friday that enables Democrats to push President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion US coronavirus relief package through Congress without Republican support in a process that will likely take weeks.
The Senate approved the budget plan earlier on Friday.
Intended as a blueprint for writing the upcoming COVID-19 aid bill, the budget resolution is not a law, and does not require a presidential signature.
“We can’t do too much here; we can do too little,” Biden told House Democrats earlier in the day. “Real, live people are hurting. And we can fix it. And we can fix it and the irony of all ironies is when we help them, we are also helping our competitive capacity, through the remainder of this decade.”
The Senate early Friday approved a measure that would let Democrats muscle the relief plan through the chamber without Republican support. Vice-President Kamala Harris was in the chair to cast her first tie-breaking vote.
Senate Democrats applauded after Harris announced the 51-50 vote around 5:30 a.m. The action came after a gruelling all-night session, where senators voted on amendments that could define the contours of the eventual COVID-19 aid bill.
U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to approve a measure that would let Democrats muscle the relief plan through the chamber without Republican support. (Greg Nash/Pool/Reuters)
New signs of weakening economy
The push for stimulus comes amid new signs of a weakening U.S. economy. Employers added just 49,000 jobs in January, after cutting 227,000 jobs in December, the Labour Department said Friday. Restaurants, retailers, manufacturers and even the health-care sector shed workers last month, meaning that private employers accounted for a meagre gain of 6,000 jobs last month.
“At that rate, it’s going to take 10 years until we hit full employment,” Biden said at the meeting with House Democrats. “That’s not hyperbole. That’s a fact.”
In this August 2020 file photo, a pedestrian is shown in front of a business that is closing amid the COVID-19 pandemic in the Manhattan borough of New York City. (Carlo Allegri/Reuters)
The unemployment rate fell to 6.3 per cent from 6.7 per cent, but there was a decline in the number of people who were either working or looking for a job in a sign that some people are dropping out of the labour force. The U.S. economy is 9.9 million jobs shy of its pre-pandemic level.
Biden, who has been meeting with lawmakers in recent days to discuss the package, welcomed the leaders of House committees who will be assembling the bill under the budget process known as “reconciliation.”
Biden also plans to make remarks Friday on the economy as he keeps up the pressure on Congress to “act big” on his relief package.
Concerns over Super Bowl
Coronavirus deaths in the United States surpassed 450,000 on Thursday, and daily deaths remain stubbornly high at more than 3,000 a day, despite falling infections and as the country races to vaccinate more people.
Infectious disease specialists expect deaths to start dropping soon, after new cases hit a peak right around the beginning of the year. New COVID-19 deaths could ebb as early as next week, said the new director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
San Diego International Airport workers hold a rally on Thursday to demand being put on the COVID-19 vaccine priority list. The biggest driver to the U.S. death toll over the past month has been California, which has averaged more than 500 deaths per day in recent weeks. (Mike Blake/Reuters)
But there’s also the risk that improving trends in infections and hospitalizations could be offset by people relaxing and coming together — including this Sunday, to watch football, she added.
“I’m worried about Super Bowl Sunday, quite honestly,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Thursday in an interview with The Associated Press.
Public health experts are watching Florida closely this week, because the Super Bowl will be played in Tampa. City leaders and the NFL are trying to physical social distancing by capping attendance at a third of the stadium’s capacity — 22,000 people.
– From Reuters and The Associated Press, last updated at 2:30 p.m. ET
What’s happening across Canada
As of 1:45 p.m. ET on Friday, Canada had reported 796,624 cases of COVID-19 — with 46,589 considered active. A CBC News tally of deaths stood at 20,591.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Friday that he understands why there is a “tremendous amount of anxiety” among Canadians with the constant flow of bad news about the inoculation campaign, but he doubled down on his promise to deliver six million shots by the end of March.
“We are very much on track,” he said.
Trudeau asked Canadians to tune out the “noise” from some circles about the sorry state of the country’s vaccine efforts, saying the temporary “ups and downs” in the rollout may be frustrating to “some people,” but they’re just that — temporary.
WATCH | Physical distance key to preventing transmission of variants, York’s chief medical officer says:
There is obvious community transmission of COVID-19 variants, according to York Region Medical Officer of Health Dr. Karim Kurji, who says the virus needs to be contained as it has the capacity to increase case numbers exponentially. 7:51
Labs completed 62,710 tests for the coronavirus and reported a provincewide positivity rate of 2.5 per cent — the lowest it has been since Oct. 22, 2020.
The provincial government has said it is considering calling off March Break in an effort to reduce the spread of COVID-19, a move educators and some parents say could lead to mass burnout.
On Wednesday, Education Minister Stephen Lecce announced that students in regions hit hard by COVID-19 will begin returning to physical classrooms next week in the face of gradually declining new infections and additional safety measures put in place for schools.
WATCH | Quick detection key to stopping spread of variants, immunologist says:
In order to limit the spread of COVID-19 variants, cases must be detected quickly to ensure isolation occurs, says microbiologist and immunologist Craig Jenne. 3:21
In Quebec, officials have also announced more details on the province’s plan for a gradual return to class for CEGEPs, colleges and universities.
Starting next week, students in red zones can head back several times a month, ideally once a week, Quebec’s Higher Education Minister Danielle McCann said Thursday. Classroom capacity is being capped at 50 per cent for theory classes, and everyone must maintain a 1.5-metre distance and wear a mask.
Quebec reported 1,101 new cases and 33 new deaths on Friday, as the province’s public health director said the government is increasing its capacity to analyze COVID-19 cases for the presence of coronavirus variants.
Dr. Horacia Arruda said eight cases of the more infectious variant discovered in the United Kingdom have been identified so far in the province.
In other provincial and territorial updates, New Brunswick reported seven new cases, Newfoundland and Labrador reported one new case and Nunuvat reported no new cases. Manitoba reported 110 new cases Friday, as well as one death.
Here’s a look at what’s happening across the country:
– From CBC News and The Canadian Press, last updated at 1:45 p.m. ET
What’s happening around the world
As of Friday afternoon, more than 105 million cases of COVID-19 had been reported worldwide, with more than 58.4 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 2.2 million.
In the Americas, the White House said the Pentagon will deploy more than 1,100 troops to help vaccinate people in the United States against COVID-19. Biden has called for setting up 100 mass vaccination centres around the country within a month. Two of the five new military teams will go to vaccination centres opening in California. Three additional centres are expected to be announced soon.
A nurse changes the diaper of a newborn baby lying in an incubator who is infected with COVID-19 at the coronavirus neo-natal unit of the Monica Pretelini Saenz Maternal Perinatal Hospital in Toluca, Mexico on Thursday. (Luis Cortes/Reuters)
In Africa, Burundi has become at least the second African country to say it doesn’t need COVID-19 vaccines, even as doses finally begin to arrive on the continent that’s seeing a deadly resurgence in cases.
The health minister of the East African nation, Thaddee Ndikumana, told reporters on Thursday evening that prevention is more important, and “since more than 95 per cent of patients are recovering, we estimate that the vaccines are not yet necessary.”
The minister spoke while announcing new measures against the pandemic. The country closed its land and water borders last month. It now has well over 1,600 confirmed coronavirus cases.
Neighbouring Tanzania this week said it had no plans to accept COVID-19 vaccines after President John Magufuli expressed doubt about them, without giving evidence. He insists the country has long defeated the virus with God’s help but faces growing pushback from fellow citizens, and officials with the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization have urged Tanzania to co-operate.
In the Middle East, Israel plans to begin slowly easing its latest coronavirus lockdown on Sunday, hoping that its rapid vaccination campaign helps to contain an outbreak accelerated by new variants.
Israelis get the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at Clalit Health Services, in a gymnasium in the central Israeli city of Hod Hasharon on Thursday. (Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images)
A government statement released early Friday details the lifting of restrictions. People will no longer have to remain within 1,000 metres of home, national parks will reopen, and restaurants can offer takeout. Workplaces not open to the public can also reopen.
Yemen expects a first batch of 2.3 million COVID-19 vaccine doses by March through the COVAX vaccine-sharing facility, and Saudi Arabia could separately finance shots for about half of the population, agencies involved have said.
Six years of war in Yemen have left what little remains of its health system relying on foreign aid. The health ministry for Yemen’s internationally recognized government on Friday said it had applied to Saudi Arabia’s King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Centre (KSRelief) for it to finance vaccines for 50 per cent of the population.
KSRelief could not immediately be reached for comment. Saudi’s finance minister last month said his country was talking to manufacturers to provide COVID-19 vaccines to low-income countries including Yemen.
In the Asia-Pacific region, all 507 Australian Open players and staff who stayed at a quarantine hotel where a worker contracted COVID-19 have tested negative and been cleared to participate in the Grand Slam, tournament director Craig Tiley said on Friday.
Health officials said on Wednesday that a worker at the Grand Hyatt hotel had contracted the virus, prompting the testing and quarantining of 160 players, as well as coaches and Australian Open officials. Warm-up matches at Melbourne Park were called off on Thursday but resumed on Friday.
A person wearing a face mask enters a drugstore in Berlin on Thursday. Most shops in Germany are still closed to avoid the spreading of the coronavirus, but essential stores are allowed to open. (Markus Schreiber/The Associated Press)
In Europe, Germany’s health minister says first batches of the newly authorized Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will be delivered to the country’s 16 states Friday.
Jens Spahn said the addition of a third vaccine would “make a real difference” to Germany’s immunization campaign, which has so far been sluggish compared to the United States or Britain. But Spahn said that, for now, the AstraZeneca shot will only be given to people aged 18-64, due to lack of data on older age groups.
Spain has reported its first case of the COVID-19 variant first detected in Brazil in a passenger arriving at Madrid airport The Madrid regional health department said Friday the 44-year-old man arrived from Brazil on Jan. 29 and had a negative PCR document but tested positive in an antibody test at the airport. He was taken to a city hospital, which later confirmed the variant.
On Friday, Spain reported 28,565 new coronavirus cases, resuming a downward trend. Spain has registered 2.9 million cases and a confirmed death toll of 61,386. The country this week began tightening restrictions on flights from Brazil and South Africa owing to variants detected in those countries. It already has similar restrictions with Britain.
British officials say everyone arriving in the country from coronavirus hot spots will have to spend 10 days in hotel quarantine starting Feb. 15 in a bid to stop new variants of the virus reaching the U.K.
Arrivals from high-risk countries will have to quarantine in approved hotels patrolled by security guards and will be billed for their stay. The government is facing criticism for the delay in implementing the policy, which it first announced in late January.
Poland’s prime minister says hotel, theatres, ski lifts, swimming pools and other facilities will be allowed to reopen with conditions such as limited capacity, social distancing and mask use starting next week.
Prime Minster Mateusz Morawiecki said Friday that the country’s existing pandemic restrictions have led to a “fragile stabilization” in the number of new COVID-19 cases but the number of deaths, around 400 daily, remains “very disturbing.”
– From The Associated Press and Reuters, last updated at 2:25 p.m. ET
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.
