Alberta reports dramatic increase in new cases compared with the last 10 days.
U.S. surpasses 9 million cases of COVID-19.
U.K. could see new lockdown in days as virus cases surge.
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The latest federal modelling on COVID-19 suggests the surge in cases could continue in the coming weeks unless Canadians take action now, which has prompted a new warning from the country’s chief public health officer.
Dr. Theresa Tam on Friday said that based on the current projections, Canadians need to cut their contacts by 25 per cent in order to get the second wave under control to the point where daily counts may drop below 2,000.
Without reducing the rates of contact, Canada could see COVID-19 case counts rise to 8,000 per day come early December, she said.
On Friday, Canadian health officials reported a record-breaking number of new cases, totalling 3,457.
People should keep Halloween activities outdoors while making sure that kids don’t cluster together for candy when trick-or-treating, says infectious diseases specialist Dr. Matthew Oughton. 1:35
Tam said the country has lost its lead in the ongoing “dance” with COVID-19 after curbing cases over the summer, and taking it back will require discipline.
“What comes next for us this fall and winter is for every one of us to determine through our decisions and our actions,” Tam told a news conference. “Letting down our guard and letting this virus win is not an option.”
Large increases in infections were reported Friday in Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec.
Manitoba saw its highest single-day spike with 480 new cases on Friday. Winnipeg is being placed under “red alert” pandemic restrictions, starting Monday.
WATCH | Winnipeg faces more restrictions due to COVID-19 surge:
After a record-breaking day for COVID-19 cases in Manitoba, the province announced more restrictions for the Winnipeg area and prepared for an influx of cases at hospitals. 2:14
That means bars and restaurants will only be allowed to offer takeout and delivery. Most retail stores will be limited to 25 per cent capacity. Movie theatres must close, and sports and recreation programming will be suspended. In the rest of the province restaurants, bars and stores will be limited to half capacity.
Religious services will be capped at 15 per cent in the Winnipeg region and 20 per cent elsewhere. Public gatherings across the province will be capped at five people — a restriction that was recently implemented in the Winnipeg region only.
The restrictions are to be in place for at least two weeks and will be reassessed at that time, said Dr. Brent Roussin, chief provincial public health officer.
The new measures were announced as 12 doctors in the province published a letter on Friday in the Winnipeg Free Press directed toward the premier and health minister, stating it’s time for a provincewide shutdown.
What’s happening in the rest of Canada
As of 11:20 a.m. ET on Saturday, Canada had 234,083 confirmed or presumptive coronavirus cases, with 28,230 of those active. Provinces and territories listed 195,719 as recovered or resolved. A CBC News tally of deaths based on provincial reports, regional health information and CBC’s reporting stood at 10,134.
Ontario reported 1,015 new cases of COVID-19 on Saturday, up from 896 cases added to the count on Friday. Locally, there are 325 new cases in Toronto on Saturday, 282 in Peel Region, 94 in Ottawa and 88 in York Region.
A pumpkin vendor waits for customers at a market in Montreal. (Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press)
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his children will not be trick-or-treating this year because Ottawa is considered one of Ontario’s hot spots.
The province has recommended against going door-to-door for candy in the modified Stage 2 public health unit regions of Ottawa, Peel Region, Toronto and York Region.
In Quebec, children can go out as long as they stay with members of their own household. Health officials in British Columbia are recommending people keep their trick-or-treating groups to six people or fewer.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford on Friday said a plan is coming next week to ease COVID-19 restrictions in the province’s hot spots.
John Oliveira, left, helps load hockey equipment for nine year-olds Delcan Morgan, left, and Anthony Oliveira, right, after having a small group session of on-ice practice in Brampton, Ont., on Oct. 26. (Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press)
Ford said he has asked his health advisers to put together a strategy to allow shuttered businesses in the regions to safely reopen.
Restrictions that banned indoor dining in restaurants and bars and closed gyms were put in place in the so-called hot spots on Oct. 10. The measures were intended to be in place for 28 days and are set to expire next Saturday.
Ford could not provide any details of the plan or say how the plan would impact restaurants and gyms.
In Peel Region, the city of Brampton is not helping the cause. Its weekly test positivity rate rose to 9.6 per cent for the week ending Oct. 24, according to a Peel Health Surveillance report published on Friday.
(CBC News)
This represents a 1.5-point increase from the previous week, when Brampton sat at 8.1 per cent positivity. This is well above the five per cent benchmark used by infectious disease experts to signal the virus could be under control.
Brampton’s positivity rate is two-and-a-half times higher than the national figure.
WATCH | Gym owners, patrons frustrated by renewed COVID-19 closures:
Despite Manitoba’s surge in COVID-19 cases, gyms remain open in most of the province even though the facilities are closed in Ontario and Quebec. Gym owners and patrons are increasingly frustrated and want to know why they’re paying more to contain the pandemic than other jurisdictions. 1:57
In Alberta, health officials reported a record number of new cases in a single day on Friday, with 622 new infections. There are currently 140 people in hospital with COVID-19 in Alberta, with 25 of them in intensive care. The Edmonton and Calgary health zones have about 2,000 cases each.
New Brunswick reported one new COVID-19 case and three recoveries on Friday.
That comes a day after the province reported four new confirmed cases, declared an outbreak at a special care home in Balmoral and announced new isolation rules for people who travel outside the Atlantic bubble for work.
Newfoundland and Labrador reported no new cases on Friday for the fourth straight day. Three active cases remain in the province.
Nova Scotia reported five new cases on Saturday, up from two additional cases on Friday, when officials in the province said the state of emergency would be renewed. The emergency status will begin at noon on Nov. 1 and run until Nov. 15, unless the province extends it.
Saskatchewan reported 76 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday, with 34 of those cases coming from the Saskatoon area. There are currently 22 people in hospital, with 16 of those receiving in-patient care.
A public health order on nightclubs is now in effect in Saskatoon, where drinking alcohol is barred between 10 p.m. and 9:30 a.m. CST, and they are required to close between 11 p.m. and 9:30 a.m. Karaoke and dance floors have been closed at the clubs, where guests are to be seated and cannot mingle between tables.
Two medical experts told CBC News they’re worried that the number of new infections will overwhelm the province’s health system.
British Columbia announced in a written public statement another 272 cases of COVID-19 on Friday and one additional death. There are currently 2,390 active cases in the province.
Three new outbreaks at health-care facilities were announced by health officials, who also reminded residents not to hold large parties over the Halloween weekend.
What’s happening around the world
A database maintained by Johns Hopkins University put the cumulative number of COVID-19 cases reported around the world since the pandemic began at more than 45.6 million as of Saturday morning, with more than 29.7 million of those listed as recovered. The death toll reported by the U.S.-based university stood at more than 1.1 million.
In Britain, the government is considering imposing a new national lockdown in England, after its scientific advisers warned that hospitalizations and deaths from the resurgence of the coronavirus could soon surpass the levels seen at the outbreak’s spring peak.
A protester in London’s Parliament Square holds a poster on Friday, on Day 5 of a week-long protest action called ‘Survival in the Square,’ highlighting how the pandemic has affected opera singers and other performers. (Hollie Adams/AFP/Getty Images)
The Times of London says Prime Minister Boris Johnson could announce a month-long lockdown as soon as Monday, though the government says no decisions have been made. Any new lockdown would likely see non-essential businesses close and people told to stay mostly at home, though schools would remain open.
The U.K. is recording more than 20,000 new coronavirus infections a day, and government statisticians say the true figure is far higher. On Saturday the country is likely to surpass one million confirmed cases since the outbreak began. The U.K. has Europe’s highest coronavirus death toll at more than 46,000.
India has registered 48,268 new confirmed coronavirus cases in the past 24 hours, continuing a downward trend.
The country’s Health Ministry on Saturday also reported 551 additional deaths, taking total fatalities up to 121,641. The figure raises the country’s total virus tally to more than 8.1 million, behind only the U.S. Over 7.4 million people have recovered.
The slowdown in daily infections has held for more than a month, with fewer than 60,000 cases for nearly two weeks. Some experts say the trend suggests the virus may have finally reached a plateau in India, but others question the testing methods and warn that a major festival due in a few weeks and the winter season could result in a new surge.
In Sri Lanka, police have, for the first time, arrested dozens of people for not wearing masks and failing to maintain physical distancing, under the new laws imposed to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
A Sri Lankan police officer stands guard as health officers collect swab samples from rail commuters to test for COVID-19 at a railway station in Colombo on Oct. 12. (Eranga Jayawardena/The Associated Press)
Police spokesperson Ajith Rohana said 39 people were detained, and separately, another 221 were held for violating a curfew.
Since Thursday, the Sri Lankan government has imposed a curfew in the whole of Western province, where new outbreaks at a garment factory and the main fish market were discovered early this month. The province includes the capital Colombo.
Infections from the two clusters have grown to 6,945 by Saturday, including 633 in the last 24 hours, bringing to more than 10,000 the number of confirmed cases in the island nation, including 19 deaths.
WATCH | COVID-19 long-haulers share experience with prolonged symptoms:
During a World Health Organization news conference, an infectious disease epidemiologist, a nurse and a software engineer share the long-term effects they’ve had after getting COVID-19. 5:38
The United States now has nine million confirmed cases of the coronavirus, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins, as infections continue to rise in nearly every state.
It took two weeks to reach the mark from eight million, the fastest jump of one million yet. It had taken more than three weeks for the total to rise from seven million to eight million.
Confirmed U.S. cases are on the rise in 47 states. Deaths are up 14 per cent over the past two weeks, averaging more than 800 every day. The virus has now killed more than 229,000 Americans.
South Dakota broke its record for new coronavirus infections reported in one day on Friday as 1,560 people tested positive.
The new virus cases brought the number of cases statewide to 13,520, according to the state’s Department of Health. That means that roughly one out of every 65 people currently has an active infection.
The state has ranked second in the nation for new cases per person over the last two weeks, according to Johns Hopkins researchers. There were about 1,359 new cases per 100,000 people.
VANCOUVER – A disciplinary investigation has found a former Vancouver police sergeant shared “disrespectful” commentary on a fellow officer’s court testimony about being sexually assaulted by a colleague.
The decision against Narinder Dosanjh, obtained by The Canadian Press, includes the running commentary on the woman’s testimony — apparently written by someone inside the courtroom — that calls her a “bad drunk” and says there was “no way” her case would be proved.
Former New Westminster police chief Dave Jansen, the external officer who rendered the decision against Dosanjh, says his assessment accounts for a culture of treating officers who testify against each other as “rats.”
Former Vancouver constable Jagraj Roger Berar was convicted in 2021 and sentenced to a year in jail for assaulting the woman, who can’t be identified because of a publication ban on her name.
Jansen says in his ruling, dated Oct. 11, that the comments in a Vancouver police group chat appear “supportive” of Berar and reflect “all-too-common myths” about women who make sexual assault allegations.
While Jansen found Dosanjh committed discreditable conduct by sharing the chats, a complaint against a more-senior Vancouver officer who was inside the courtroom, and who the victim and other officers believed wrote the commentary, were not substantiated.
The ruling says Jansen, who retired as New Westminster’s chief constable, would accept submissions before deciding how Dosanjh should be punished.
The woman who was assaulted was the complainant in the disciplinary investigation, and said in an interview she felt “vindicated” by Jansen’s decision because it “truly paints what I’ve been through,” after reporting a fellow officer for sexual assault.
She said many other women in municipal policing fear speaking out about ill-treatment at work, and some have told her about being assaulted and harassed but feared ruining their careers if they complained.
“This decision is important for those women to see,” she said. “It shows the tides are changing. Like, this is the first win I’ve had.”
A spokesman for the Surrey Police Service, where Dosanjh now works, did not immediately answer a question about how he was penalized, and said Dosanjh declined an interview request with The Canadian Press.
In his decision, Jansen said there was an “unfortunate but often pervasive” culture of treating officers who complain as “‘rats’, who betrayed their colleagues.”
“In terms of the messages themselves, Sergeant Dosanjh alleges that they are not degrading, humiliating or derogatory and do not attack the personal character of the complainant. I disagree,” Jansen wrote.
The decision includes a screenshot of the commentary about the complainant, who said the order of the messages appeared to refer to her evidence while she was being cross-examined and suggested the comments were written by someone listening to her testimony.
The commentary on a Vancouver police chat group on the Signal messaging app said the victim “wore a wire twice,” and “admitted in cross to possibly drinking way more alcohol than she originally claimed.”
“Her memory is super hazy and there’s no way you can prove beyond reasonable doubt,” the person wrote.
“And she admitted that she is really bad drunk,” they added.
Another message said it was a “nail in the coffin” of the case that video showed the complainant “cuddling, holding hands” with Berar.
The victim, who became aware of the commentary when a friend in the department showed them to her, was distressed by the messages and disputed their accuracy, said Jansen.
“The comments also appear to reflect some of the all-too-common myths around women making allegations of sexual assault. Some of these myths include the belief that because a victim socialized with the perpetrator, or engaged in some consensual activity with him, therefore she must have consented to the assault,” he wrote.
Jansen’s decision said Dosanjh shared the messages with a fellow officer after getting them from a “VPD chat group that he claims he knew little about, from a co-worker he claims not to be able to identify.”
The decision said other officers believed the commentary was written bya more-senior officer in the department who had been present at the trial, but Jansen said the discreditable conduct complaint against that person was unsubstantiated.
The decision said Dosanjh claimed he was the “fall guy” and “a pawn in a broader game.”
Jansen’s decision said Dosanjh was a senior officer and supervisor who was aware of the “vulnerability of victims of sexual crimes and of the myths that surround sexual assault victims.”
It said Dosanjh’s “distribution of these messages that were disrespectful of an alleged victim of sexual violence who was also a co-worker, should they become public, would likely discredit the reputation of the police force.”
The Vancouver Police Department did not immediately provide comment on Jansen’s decision.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 13, 2024.
FREDERICTON – The offspring of beetles imported from British Columbia are ready to take up the fight against an invasive insect that is killing hemlock trees in Nova Scotia.
Last fall and spring, about 5,000 Laricobius nigrinus beetles — affectionately called Lari by scientists — made an overnight journey from the West Coast.
Lucas Roscoe, research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, says in the fight against the woolly adelgid that is destroying swaths of hemlock trees in Nova Scotia, the first step was to make sure the Lari beetle can survive a Nova Scotia winter.
The one-to-two-millimetre black flying beetles were released across six sites in Nova Scotia that had the woolly adelgids.
In one of the sites, scientists placed cages of imported beetles and about 60 per cent of them were able to survive the winter in Nova Scotia, which Roscoe says is an encouraging rate.
He says the woolly adelgid was first seen in southwestern Nova Scotia in 2017 and the peppercorn-sized insect, aided by climate change, has since spread north.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 13, 2024.
Dozens of researchers across Canada, including renowned environmentalist David Suzuki, have joined a growing chorus of voices urging the federal government to halt the importation of an endangered monkey species for medical research in Quebec.
A letter signed by 80 scientists, academics, doctors and students says testing on long-tailed macaques from Cambodia should be banned due to ethical concerns and potential public-health risks.
“A decade ago, chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, ceased to be used for experimentation because using such animal ‘models’ could no longer be justified from scientific, ethical, and/or financial perspectives,” says the letter addressed to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, his environment minister and the premier of Quebec.
The researchers say they are also concerned about “the serious risks of transmission of zoonotic pathogens” that could be associated with transporting macaques.
Their letter urges the federal government to end charter flights that have been bringing the macaques into Canada, and to adopt regulations banning the importation of all primates for biomedical testing.
It’s the latest group to add more pressure on Ottawa to suspend the monkey imports by Charles River Laboratories, a U.S.-based pharmaceutical giant that has a sprawling facility in Montreal.
The company announced in 2023 that it was halting macaque imports into the U.S., after it was subpoenaed in a case that involved the indictment of two senior Cambodian officials over what authorities described as “multiple felonies for their role in bringing wild long-tailed macaques into the United States.”
No charges have been brought against Charles River Laboratories, or any of its officials, and the company has said it will fully co-operate with the U.S. investigation.
At around the same time, imports of monkeys from Cambodia into Canada dramatically surged, with Statistics Canada data showing a 500 per cent increase in 2023 from the year before.
Environment and Climate Change Canada, the federal department responsible for monitoring commercial trade in wildlife, confirmed to the Canadian Press that Charles River Laboratories has imported 6,769 long-tailed macaques into the country between January 2023 and August of this year. The monetary value of these imported macaques is around $120 million dollars, according to Statistics Canada.
The department previously said that officials rigorously and closely inspect imports of foreign animals, including those brought in by Charles River Laboratories, and that all macaque imports so far this year have complied with federal and international wildlife regulations.
The government and the company have both said that no Canadian laws have been broken.
Last month, the Canadian Transportation Authority issued a permit for another shipment on a cargo plane chartered by Charles River Laboratories. A flight tracker shows that a plane with the same flight number as what is shown on the permit departed Phnom Penh, Cambodia last Thursday, and arrived in Montreal on Friday.
Jesse Greener, a professor of chemistry at Laval University who signed the researchers’ letter to the government, said medical technology has developed to a point that makes it unjustifiable for the pharmaceutical industry to continue using live primates for testing.
“The government should take a leadership role and help researchers and surely the private sector to pivot from using these unethical, and I would say old and outdated and unreliable animal models, and embrace these much more efficient and ethical approaches that are … exploding right now,” said Greener, who has done research on methods to replace animals in such experiments.
“It is grotesque,” he said of the animal use. “It is time that we change the page on this chapter of terrible research and commercial activities.”
Canada banned the use of animals for cosmetic testing last year, but it is still legal to use live primates for drug testing purposes.
The federal government said a draft strategy aimed at reducing and replacing the use of animals in drug testing was published in September and open to public consultations for 60 days.
The strategy, which will be revised based on input from researchers, experts and others, is expected to be published in June 2025, it said.
“The government of Canada is committed to advancing efforts to replace, reduce, or refine the use of vertebrate animals in toxicity testing where possible,” Environment and Climate Change Canada said in a statement Tuesday.
Charles River Laboratories previously told The Canadian Press that while it is also committed to reducing its use of live primates, global regulatory bodies require drugs to be tested on animals before they are evaluated in humans.
The company said the use of non-human primates has been vital in developing treatments for various diseases and that the standards it applies in its facilities are exceeding global norms.
Matthew Green, a New Democrat MP who had previously called on the federal government to halt the latest shipment of macaques, said he has “great concern” about importing this exotic animal.
“Generally in Canada, Canadians like to believe that our government has higher regulations and more stringent enforcement protocols when it comes to protecting endangered species, yet this is not the case in comparison to what the United States has done,” he said.
Green and two of his NDP colleagues wrote a letter to three federal ministers last month, demanding an “immediate attention” to the issue.
The Animal Alliance of Canada also sent a letter to the environment minister in August, urging the immediate suspension of monkey importation from Cambodia.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 13, 2024.
