Canada’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign kicked off in Ontario on Monday with the vaccination of a personal support worker in Toronto, which is still under lockdown as the province tries to slow the spread of the virus.
Anita Quidangen, a personal support worker at the Rekai Centre in Toronto, received the first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine given in Canada. There were cheers and clapping as Quidangen got her vaccine — a major milestone in the fight against the novel coronavirus that has infected more than 464,000 people and left more than 13,400 people dead in Canada alone.
Derek Thompson, another personal support worker at Rekai Centres, receives a <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/COVID19?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#COVID19</a> shot at <a href=”https://twitter.com/UHN?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>@UHN</a>. (Reminder this is a two-dose vaccine, so these workers are not fully protected against the virus until they get they second dose three weeks from now.) <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/COVID19Ontario?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#COVID19Ontario</a> <a href=”https://t.co/9lJYaSCI41″>pic.twitter.com/9lJYaSCI41</a>
Quebec, the hardest-hit province in the country, is expected to launch its own vaccination efforts later Monday.
Retired general Rick Hillier, who is leading Ontario’s vaccine task force, said the number of vaccinations that will take place in the province Monday is “probably pretty small,” but he said it’s still significant — especially for health-care workers and others who have been at the front line of the pandemic for months.
“This is V-Day,” he told CBC News Network early Monday, before the first dose was given.
WATCH | Retired general Rick Hillier calls the arrival of the COVID-19 vaccine an ‘incredible’ day:
Retired general Rick Hillier, head of Ontario’s vaccine task force, calls the arrival of the COVID-19 vaccine ‘an incredible day.’ ‘We’re on the way out of the abyss,’ he said. 0:50
He said there will be challenges and problems ahead as the province works through what will eventually be a massive vaccination campaign.
“That’s exactly what we want — we want those problems and challenges because it means we’re on the way out of the abyss,” he told CBC’s Heather Hiscox.
Quebec’s first doses are expected to be given at long-term care homes, while Ontario has said that its first doses were set to be given at hospitals in Toronto and Ottawa.
The Donald Berman Maimonides Geriatric Centre in Montreal will begin vaccinating staff and residents today. Lucie Tremblay is the Dir. of Nursing at the Regional Health Authority for Montreal Centre-West. She shows us how the Centre is ready to go as soon as doses arrive <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/cbcnn?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#cbcnn</a> <a href=”https://t.co/GYgV6UWRgA”>pic.twitter.com/GYgV6UWRgA</a>
Ontario’s vaccination effort was initially expected to begin later in the week, but Hillier said that the Toronto effort would begin Monday.
“We don’t want to waste any time here,” he said.
Ontario is putting the required second dose aside for the first groups of people receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. That system could change as the delivery protocol changes, but for now officials have said they want to ensure that all the people who receive the first vaccine will be able to access their second shot.
Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin, who is handling the logistics of the vaccine rollout, said on Sunday morning that the delivery schedule is “unfolding exactly as planned.”
Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin says the shipments of the COVID-19 vaccine will arrive on different flights and are being monitored every hour with UPS. Some shipments will be arriving on Sunday night and the rest in the coming day or two. <a href=”https://twitter.com/RosieBarton?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>@RosieBarton</a> <a href=”https://t.co/ulhFPOX9h0″>pic.twitter.com/ulhFPOX9h0</a>
Fortin told Rosemary Barton, CBC’s chief political correspondent, that provinces confirmed they are ready at the 14 initial locations for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which needs to be kept at extremely cold temperatures.
“We’ve really walked this walk all together in the last several days,” he said, noting that everyone has been closely collaborating.
Ontario reported 1,940 new cases of COVID-19 on Monday, with 544 new cases in Toronto and 390 in Peel Region. Health Minister Christine Elliott said the province completed nearly 57,100 tests.
The province also reported 23 additional deaths, bringing the death toll to 3,972.
COVID-19 hospitalizations in Ontario increased to 857, with 244 people in intensive care units, according to a provincial dashboard.
Quebec reported 1,620 new cases of COVID-19 on Monday and 25 additional deaths. Hospitalizations rose to 890, with 122 COVID-19 patients in intensive care units.
U.S. vaccination campaign underway
The largest vaccination campaign in U.S. history got underway Monday as health workers in select hospitals rolled up their sleeves for shots to protect them from COVID-19 and start beating back the pandemic.
“I feel hopeful today. Relieved,” said critical case nurse Sandra Lindsay after getting a shot in the arm at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New York.
Nurse Annabelle Jimenez, left, congratulates nurse Sandra Lindsay after she was inoculated with the COVID-19 vaccine at Long Island Jewish Medical Center on Monday in the Queens borough of New York. (Mark Lennihan/AFP/Getty Images)
Shipments of precious frozen vials of vaccine made by Pfizer Inc. and its German partner BioNTech began arriving at hospitals around the country Monday.
The virus has infected more than 16.2 million people and killed nearly 300,000 people in the U.S., the hardest-hit country in the world.
What’s happening across Canada
As of 11:30 a.m. ET on Monday, Canada’s COVID-19 case count stood at 464,314 with 74,544 of those cases considered active. A CBC News tally of deaths based on provincial reports, regional health information and CBC’s reporting stood at 13,479.
Alberta reported 22 deaths and 1,717 new cases of COVID-19 on Sunday as tight new public health restrictions came into effect across the province.
Alberta, which has now seen 719 deaths, has faced a steep climb in hospitalizations in recent weeks. As of Sunday, the province had 681 COVID-19 patients in hospital, including 136 in intensive care.
The additional restrictions that went into place on Sunday require some businesses — like bars and hair salons — to close down in-person service, while others must limit their capacity.
Dr. Darren Markland, an Edmonton ICU doctor, told CBC’s Rosemary Barton that he expects to get the vaccine this week.
“It brings a level of hope to the front-line workers that we were missing for a while there,” said Markland, who has spoken out about the strain on the province’s hospitals.
In Saskatchewan, health officials reported three additional deaths and 222 new cases of COVID-19 on Sunday. There were 117 people with COVID-19 in hospital, including 23 in intensive care units.
Manitoba reported seven additional deaths and 273 new cases of COVID-19 on Sunday. Health officials in the province reported 304 people in hospital, with 43 people in intensive care.
There were no new cases reported in Yukon, or the Northwest Territories on Sunday.
British Columbia doesn’t provide updated COVID-19 data to the public over the weekend. Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry and Health Minister Adrian Dix are expected to provide more details today about the limited availability of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine starting this week.
What’s happening around the world
From The Associated Press and Reuters, last updated at 10:25 a.m. ET
As of early Monday morning, there were more than 72.3 million cases of COVID-19 reported worldwide, with more than 47.3 million of those considered recovered or resolved, according to a database maintained by Johns Hopkins University. The global death toll stood at more than 1.6 million.
In COVID-19 vaccine news, family doctors in England are set to start COVID-19 inoculations this week, in the latest stage of the U.K.’s mass vaccination program. The National Health Service said hundreds of general medical clinics across England are taking delivery of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine on Monday, and some will start offering the shots by the afternoon. The majority, though, will begin on Tuesday, it said.
Priority will go to people who are 80 and older, as well as staff and residents of care homes.
The first shipments of COVID-19 vaccine in the United States moved to distribution points around the country, while the EU weighed donating five per cent of its COVID-19 vaccines to poorer nations.
WATCH | U.K. doctors to begin vaccinations in their clinics:
About 100 family doctors in the U.K. begin the challenging task of inoculating patients in their offices with the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, which needs very special handling. 2:13
Singapore, meanwhile, has become the latest country to approve Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine for pandemic use and expects delivery of the first shots by the end of December, its prime minister said.
German pharmaceutical company CureVac, meanwhile, said it has enrolled the first participant in the Phase 3 clinical study of its mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine candidate. The Tuebingen-based company said the study is expected to include more than 35,000 participants at sites in Europe and Latin America.
In Africa, the government of Eswatini has announced on Twitter that Prime Minister Ambrose Dlamini has died after testing positive for COVID-19. The 52-year-old Dlamini, who had been prime minister since 2018, announced in November that he had tested positive for the virus and was being treated at a hospital in neighbouring South Africa.
The Eswatini government said he died on Sunday afternoon. Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, has recorded almost 7,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 127 deaths.
South Africa is experiencing a resurgence of COVID-19 and President Cyril Ramaphosa is scheduled to address the nation Monday evening on the country’s response.
In the Asia-Pacific region, South Korea ordered schools to close from Tuesday in the capital Seoul and surrounding areas as it battles its worst outbreak since the pandemic began.
Special Warfare officers wear personal protective equipment at the makeshift coronavirus test centre on Monday in Seoul. Officers were sent to public health centres in the South Korean city and surrounding areas to help with things like contact tracing, data management and transferring samples for virus tests. (Ko Sung-Joon/Getty Images)
Malaysia’s Top Glove, the world’s biggest maker of medical-grade latex gloves, has seen its complex become the country’s biggest coronavirus cluster, months after it fired a whistleblower who photographed factory crowding.
In Europe, local officials in London have advised some schools to close and move to online learning as coronavirus cases rise rapidly in the British capital.
The advice from officials in north London’s Islington borough and southeast London’s Greenwich came as the capital and its surrounding areas face being moved into the highest level of COVID-19 restrictions as early as Monday. Health Secretary Matt Hancock is expected to update lawmakers later Monday.
Italy on Sunday registered 484 confirmed COVID-19 deaths, one of its lowest daily death tolls in about a month. But those latest deaths were enough to eclipse Britain’s toll as having Europe’s highest toll in the pandemic, according to tracking done by Johns Hopkins.
In the Americas, Los Angeles County has again broken a record for coronavirus hospitalizations, fulfilling the county public health director’s dire predictions in just days.
Figures released Sunday afternoon show that more than 4,000 people were hospitalized for COVID-19 in the nation’s most populous county.
That breaks the previous record set only the day before, with 3,850 patients in a hospital, and follows the trend of hospitalizations increasing nearly every day since Nov. 1.
Volunteers wear face masks and Santa hats while delivering gifts to people in cars passing by at the Crenshaw YMCA Holiday Spectacular in Los Angeles on Sunday. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)
The L.A. County health director warned last Monday, when hospitalizations were near 3,000, that the county could see the statistic climb to 4,000 within two weeks.
Statewide coronavirus figures were not immediately available Sunday. More than 325,000 doses of a COVID-19 vaccine are on their way to California.
In the Middle East, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said he has gone into isolation after being exposed to someone who tested positive for the coronavirus.
It said Netanyahu himself was tested on Sunday and Monday, and that both tests came back negative. He will remain in isolation until Friday. Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials have periodically gone into isolation after possible exposure to the virus since the start of the pandemic.
Iran has reported more than 1.1 million cases of COVID-19, with more than 52,400 deaths.
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.
