WHO advises against treating hospitalized COVID-19 patients with remdesivir.
Pfizer seeking emergency use of its COVID-19 vaccine in U.S.
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New modelling released Friday morning shows Canada could see 20,000 COVID-19 cases per day by the end of the year if people maintain their current number of personal contacts. Meanwhile, Ontario is set to announce new public health restrictions in its hardest-hit areas.
On Thursday, CBC News saw the modelling charts prepared by the Public Health Agency of Canada, which also project a worse-case scenario of 60,000 a day by the end of December if Canadians increase their current level of contact with other people.
Conversely, limiting interactions to essential activities while maintaining physical distancing and adhering to other public health guidelines could bring that number to under 10,000 cases a day by that time, according to the modelling.
Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam offered detailed projections on potential infections and deaths at 9 a.m. ET Friday.
Meanwhile, Ontario is expected to issue more stringent restrictions for its COVID-19 hot spots — Toronto, and Peel and York regions — as Premier Doug Ford says there are “difficult but necessary decisions to make.”
At a press conference on Thursday, the premier didn’t specify what those measures would be as they still needed to go before cabinet, saying only that they will have to be “tough” in the hardest-hit areas.
Dr. Lawrence Loh, Peel’s medical officer of health, said he thinks further closures and restrictions are warranted at this time to “reduce the number of contacts and interactions” occurring in the region.
WATCH | Further restrictions needed in Peel Region, says medical officer of health:
Dr. Lawrence Loh says “some sort of pause” is necessary for Peel Region to curb its daily growth in COVID-19 cases. 2:08
Ontario reported another 1,210 cases of COVID-19 and 28 more deaths on Thursday, with Toronto and Peel Region each seeing over 300 of those cases.
While the number of people in hospitals with COVID-19 fell by nine to 526, admissions to intensive care jumped considerably up to 146, an increase of 19, with 88 of those people on ventilators.
What’s happening across Canada
Canada’s COVID-19 case count — as of 7 a.m. ET Friday — stood at 315,753, with 52,194 of those considered active cases. A CBC News tally of deaths based on provincial reports, regional health information and CBC’s reporting stood at 11,265.
In Atlantic Canada, New Brunswick has moved the Moncton health region back to the stricter orange phase due to the growing number of cases in that region.
WATCH | Moncton region goes back to orange phase as cases rise:
Dr. Jennifer Russell announced Thursday that Zone 1, the Moncton region, will return to the orange phase of recovery 4:24
Quebec reported 1,207 new cases and 34 more deaths on Thursday, as Premier François Legault proposed a “moral contract” with residents in order to facilitate some holiday cheer.
Legault said residents can have small gatherings — with no more than 10 friends and family members — around Christmas if they voluntarily quarantine themselves for a week before and after.
Manitoba introduced new COVID-19 restrictions on Thursday that ban people from having anyone inside their home who doesn’t live there, with few exceptions, and businesses from selling non-essential items in stores.
The new measures were announced as the province reported 475 new cases, eight more deaths and a record high of 263 in hospital.
WATCH | Manitoba tightens shopping restrictions as COVID-19 cases spike:
With cases still spiking, Manitoba has announced stiff new COVID-19 restrictions, including what officials call the toughest retail restrictions in Canada, meaning Manitobans will soon find it hard to buy anything not deemed essential. 2:27
British Columbia is bringing in wide-ranging new rules for controlling the spread of COVID-19, including mandatory masks in indoor public and retail spaces and restricting social gatherings to household members only for everyone across B.C.
The move came as the province recorded 538 new cases and one additional death on Thursday. There were 6,929 active cases of the virus and 217 patients in hospital — both record highs for the province.
In the North, Nunavut health officials reported four more cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, bringing the number of cases in the territory to 74.
A two-week territory-wide lockdown is currently in effect in an effort to get a handle on the outbreak and avoid overwhelming Nunavut’s small, isolated health-care centres.
Yukon said it will “divorce” B.C. from its COVID-19 travel bubble as case counts rise in that province. A new case was confirmed in Whitehorse on Wednesday evening, which brought the territory’s case total since the start of the pandemic to 26.
Meanwhile, the Northwest Territories has renewed a state of emergency for Yellowknife to clear the way for an emergency warming shelter in light of capacity limitations at other facilities amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
What’s happening around the world
As of early Friday, there were more than 57 million reported cases of COVID-19 worldwide, with more than 36.6 million of those cases listed as recovered, according to a COVID-19 tracking tool maintained by Johns Hopkins University. The global death toll stood at more than 1.3 million.
In the Americas, California and Ohio ordered nightly curfews on social gatherings as the number of patients hospitalized in the United States jumped nearly 50 per cent in two weeks.
Mexico has registered 100,000 confirmed coronavirus deaths within days of passing one million infections. It is the fourth country to reach that death toll, after the U.S., Brazil and India.
Relatives visit the grave of a family member who died in August of COVID-19 in Mexico City this week. Mexico has surpassed 100,000 deaths from the virus. (Edgard Garrido/Reuters)
In Europe, Portugal’s parliament has voted by a comfortable margin to extend the country’s state of emergency by two weeks amid the pandemic. The state of emergency has allowed the government to impose nighttime and weekend curfews across most of the country.
Patriarch Irinej, the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, has died after contracting the coronavirus. The patriarch was hospitalized with the virus early in November, soon after attending the funeral of the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro, Bishop Amfilohije, who also died from complications caused by the COVID-19 infection.
Ukraine said on Friday it hoped to receive eight million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine — enough vaccine for up to 20 per cent of its population — in the first half of next year, as it reported 14,575 new coronavirus infections, passing the previous day’s record of 13,357. The country has now recorded more than 598,000 cases, with more than 10,000 deaths.
In Asia-Pacific, Australia’s once hard-hit state of Victoria has gone three weeks without a new COVID-19 case for the first time since February. The state has also decided to close its border with neighbouring South Australia, which was in its second day of a six-day lockdown on Friday as it experiences a new spike in cases.
Sri Lankan officials announced that they will suspend all passenger trains for two days as COVID-19 cases surge in Colombo and its suburbs. The authorities have locked down many parts of the capital and its suburbs since last month when the virus surged.
Inmates stage a protest on the roof of the Welikada prison in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo on Wednesday to demand their early release from custody to avoid contracting the coronavirus. (Lakruwan Wanniarachchi/AFP/Getty Images)
India’s total number of coronavirus cases since the pandemic began has crossed nine million. While the country’s new daily cases have seen a steady decline for weeks now, authorities in the capital of New Delhi are fighting to head off nearly 7,500 new cases a day while ensuring that the flagging economy doesn’t capsize again.
South Korea’s prime minister has urged the public to avoid social gatherings and stay at home as much as possible as the country registered more than 300 new virus cases for a third consecutive day.
Hong Kong reported a spike in daily cases to 26, two days before an arrangement with Singapore to allow a limited number of passengers to fly both ways without having to go through quarantine kicks in.
In Africa, one player in the South Africa cricket squad has tested positive for the coronavirus ahead of a six-game limited-over series against England, and two others have also been isolated after being in close contact with him.
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.
