More provinces have reduced isolation requirements for people who test positive for COVID-19 Friday in an effort to lessen staffing shortages as the Omicron variant continued to drive diagnoses at record rates.
British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba and New Brunswick are the latest to reduce to five the number of days that people with two doses of vaccine must isolate if they test positive for the virus.
“The illness that we’re seeing, particularly in health-care workers, is starting to have impacts on our health-care system and our long-term care system.”
Those who are still symptomatic after five days must continue to isolate until they feel better, and those who become asymptomatic have to wear a mask around others for an extra five days — rules also brought into force by Alberta and Manitoba on Friday.
The changes come as the Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus continues to drive high case counts across the country. Manitoba reported a single-day high of 1,494 new cases on Friday, as well as five new deaths. B.C. reported 3,795 new cases and three new deaths. (Alberta did not announce new numbers during its live update Friday; it will resume regular reporting on Jan. 4.)
Early research suggests the Omicron variant causes less severe outcomes than previous strains. But experts say the sheer number of cases — caused by Omicron’s high transmissibility — threaten to overrun the health-care system because more people will be hospitalized and more health workers will be infected.
New Brunswick Health Minister Dorothy Shephard said her province is also experiencing staffing shortages in the health-care system due to Omicron. “We expect the situation will become even more challenging as we live through this latest wave of COVID-19,” she said.
In response to the surging COVID-19 case numbers, the province’s hospitals are moving to urgent and emergency services only. That means people in New Brunswick can expect to see “non-urgent and elective surgeries, procedures and lab services cancelled,” Shephard said.
WATCH | N.B. moving to prevent hospitals from becoming overwhelmed:
N.B. braces for major impact from Omicron
9 hours ago
Duration 6:15
Fearing that cases of the Omicron variant will overwhelm New Brunswick hospitals, Health Minister Dorothy Shephard announced Friday that they will move to emergency services only. 6:15
During the same news conference, Premier Blaine Higgs announced that he had tested positive for COVID-19 using a rapid test and was waiting for confirmation via a more accurate PCR test. He said he was experiencing only mild symptoms.
New Brunswick reported a record 682 cases of COVID-19 on Friday. Due to the influx of new infections, the province announced it will limit access to its PCR tests starting Tuesday to only those considered at highest risk of the virus, including people who live in congregate-care settings and members of the general public who are 50 or older.
New Brunswick is also pushing back the resumption of in-person learning by 11 days, with students to learn virtually until Jan. 21.
— From The Canadian Press and CBC News, last updated at 8 p.m. ET
What’s happening across Canada
WATCH | Provinces rewrite isolation rules to counter rising staff shortages:
Provinces rewrite isolation rules to counter rising staff shortages
23 hours ago
Duration 2:04
Provinces like P.E.I. and Saskatchewan are rewriting isolation rules for certain groups of employees in an attempt to prevent staff shortages and the loss of essential services. 2:04
For more details on the situation in your province and territory — including the latest on hospitalizations and ICU capacity, as well as details on how provinces are handling surging demand for tests — click through to the local coverage below. With testing capacity strained, experts say true case counts are likely far higher than reported. Hospitalization data at the regional level is also evolving, with several provinces saying they will begin to report more precise data that separates the number of people in hospital because of COVID-19 from those in hospital for another medical issue who also happen to test positive.
Nova Scotia reported 618 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday, bringing its total number of active infections to 5,117. The number of people in hospitals with COVID-19 rose to 34 — up from 25 on Thursday — including four people in intensive care.
The update comes a day after the provincesaid it would ramp up its COVID-19 vaccine booster program. Starting next week, Nova Scotia will accelerate its descending age-based approach for boosters to include those 30 years of age and older, Premier Tim Houston told reporters. About 500,000 people aged 30 to 49 will become eligible for a booster in January.
Prince Edward Island reported 175 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday, a new single-day record. There are currently 814 active cases in the province. Three people were in hospital because of the disease, while five other patients in hospital for non-COVID-19 reasons have tested positive.
Meanwhile, health officials in Newfoundland and Labrador reported a single-day record of 431 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday, as well as one additional death. There were 1,746 active reported infections in the province.
A privately run COVID-19 testing site is seen at a shopping mall in Toronto on Friday. The site offers tests to customers with prices ranging from $88 for a rapid antigen test to $400 for a one-hour PCR test. (Chris Young/The Canadian Press)
Ontario on Friday saw 16,713 new cases of COVID-19 and 15 additional deaths. The update comes a day after the top health official announced the province was delaying the start of school by two days and revamping testing and isolation rules, as daily COVID-19 cases continue to break records. Classes were set to resume Monday in much of the province, but the holiday break will now end on Wednesday.
Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Kieran Moore also announced on Thursday that publicly funded PCR testing will now be available only for high-risk individuals who are symptomatic or those at risk of severe illness from COVID-19.
In Quebec, new restrictions and a curfew will go into effect later Friday after an announcement from Premer François Legault on Thursday. The changes come into effect as health officials in the province reported 16,461 new cases of COVID-19 — another high — and 13 additional deaths.
Saskatchewan reported 735 new cases on Friday, a new daily high. This comes a day after Premier Scott Moe said the government is changing the metric of how it tracks COVID-19 infections as the province sees rising cases, but decreasing hospitalizations. Moe said he won’t bring in any new public health orders or restrictions because vaccines and regular testing are lowering the number of deadly health conditions caused by the Omicron variant of COVID-19.
In the North, Nunavut on Friday reported another 40 cases of COVID-19. Premier P.J. Akeeagok earlier this week announced an extension of restrictions as the health system faced increasing strain. The Northwest Territories, which is delaying a return to school, reported 42 new cases. Yukon reported 26 new cases and one additional death.
— From The Canadian Press and CBC News, last updated at 6:30 p.m. ET
What’s happening around the world
A staffer at the Sheba Medical Center receives a fourth dose of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, in Ramat Gan, Israel on Monday. (Tsafrir Abayov/The Associated Press)
As of Friday evening, roughly 287.8 million cases of COVID-19 had been reported worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University’s coronavirus tracker. The reported global death toll stood at more than 5.4 million.
In the Middle East, Israel has begun delivering a fourth vaccine dose for people most vulnerable to coronavirus, becoming one of the first countries to do so. The country will administer a fourth dose of the vaccine to individuals with weakened immune systems along with elderly residents and employees in care homes.
The rollout of the fourth dose began at Israel’s Sheba Medical Center on Friday morning and was administered to heart and lung transplant patients.
In Europe, Paris region health authorities have instructed hospitals to cancel more non-urgent medical procedures to free up intensive care beds for the growing influx of people gravely sick with COVID-19. The regional health authority said Friday that it expects within days to surge past the mark of 50 per cent of intensive care beds occupied by COVID-19 patients.
Britain has approved Pfizer’s COVID-19 pill for patients over the age of 18 years who have mild to moderate infection and are at high risk of their illness worsening. The approval comes as the country scrambles to build its defences amid rapidly increasing case numbers. Based on data, the pill, Paxlovid, is most effective when taken during the early stages of COVID-19, Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said on Friday, recommending that the drug be used within five days of the onset of symptoms.
Confirmed new daily cases in the U.K. hit another record on Friday at 189,846, and the government reported a further 203 deaths. The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 rose to 12,395, up 68 per cent from a week earlier.
In Africa, South Africa has lifted a midnight to 4 a.m. curfew on people’s movement with immediate effect, believing the country has passed the peak of its fourth COVID-19 wave driven by the Omicron variant.
As of today the cumulative number of <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/COVID19?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#COVID19</a> cases identified in SA is 3 446 532 with 12 979 new cases reported. Today 126 deaths have been reported bringing the total to 91 061 deaths. The cumulative number of recoveries now stand at 3 159 143 with a recovery rate of 91,7% <a href=”https://t.co/bJftLs1qro”>pic.twitter.com/bJftLs1qro</a>
In the Asia-Pacific region, the Philippines will impose tighter curbs in the capital region for the next two weeks, the acting presidential spokesperson said on Friday, to try to limit infections by the Omicron variant. The health ministry on Friday recorded 2,961 new coronavirus infections, a two-month high, and reported a positivity rate of 10.3 per cent.
The region including the capital Manila is an urban sprawl of 16 cities that is home to more than 13 million people. It will be placed under the third part of a five-scale alert system on Jan. 3 to 15, spokesperson Karlo Nograles said.
New coronavirus infections soared again in Australia on Friday to a record of more than 32,000, just days after surpassing 10,000 for the first time. While hospitalizations and deaths have been increasing from the surge, so far they haven’t reached comparative levels seen in previous outbreaks.
Meanwhile, South Korea says it will extend its toughest distancing rules for another two weeks to try to lower critical cases and guard against the Omicron variant.
Meanwhile, thousands of flights within the United States and internationally were delayed or cancelled on Friday, adding to the travel disruptions during the holiday week due to adverse weather and rising cases of the Omicron variant.
— From The Associated Press and Reuters, last updated at 7:30 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.
