Manitoba’s sharp new “code red” COVID-19 restrictions kicked in early Thursday as the province tries to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Health officials reported 431 new cases and nine new deaths in the province on Wednesday. Hospitalizations stood at 218, with 32 in intensive care — a record high in the province.
Schools will stay open, but everything from non-essential retail to theatres and restaurant dining rooms will be closed.
Chief Provincial Public Health Officer Dr. Brent Roussin, who earlier this week said the province was at a “crossroads in our fight against this pandemic,” urged people to stay home to stop the spread.
In neighbouring Saskatchewan, more than 300 doctors have signed a letter calling for that province to do more to fight the novel virus.
“If more is not done to change our course we are confident that winter will bring overflowing hospitals, cancelled surgeries, overwhelmed health-care providers and needless death,” the letter said.
COVID-19 case numbers have been rising in Saskatchewan, with 112 new cases reported on Wednesday. The latest figures from the province put the number of hospitalizations at 48, with 11 in intensive care.
A letter signed by hundreds of doctors and three major unions representing health-care workers in Alberta sent to Premier Jason Kenney on Thursday made an explicit call for tighter restrictions, including a suspension of many indoor group activities.
“We have reached a juncture where only strong and decisive mandatory measures can prevent our hospitals from becoming overwhelmed,” the letter said.
The letter said the province’s testing system is “strained” and contact tracing capacities “have collapsed.”
“We see no other way to break chains of transmission and decrease cases, than to implement a “circuit breaker” of short, strict measures.”
Alberta is considering stepped-up COVID-19 restrictions, two officials told CBC News, as COVID-19 cases in that province continue to climb. Health officials reported 672 new cases of COVID-19 and seven more deaths on Wednesday. Hospitalizations stood at 217, with 46 people in intensive care.
What’s happening across Canada
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As of 10:30 a.m. ET on Thursday, provinces and territories in Canada had reported a cumulative total of 278,636 confirmed or presumptive coronavirus cases. Provinces and territories listed 224,116 cases as recovered or resolved. A CBC News tally of deaths based on provincial reports, regional health information and CBC’s reporting stood at 10,703.
Across Canada’s North, there were two new cases reported on Wednesday: one in Nunvaut and one in the Northwest Territories.
In British Columbia, the Interior Health authority has issued a COVID-19 alert to its residents as cases rise in the region. The health authority, which includes communities like Kamloops and Kelowna, said in a statement that it’s concerned by the upward trend and frequency of new local clusters.
A recent provincial health officer’s order limiting social interactions doesn’t apply to Interior Health, but local health officials said they need the public’s help to prevent further restrictions.
Ontario on Thursday reported 1,575 cases of COVID-19, with 472 in Toronto, 448 in Peel Region, 155 in York Region and 91 in Ottawa. The province reported 15 additional deaths, bringing the number of COVID-19 deaths reported in Ontario since the outbreak began to 3,293.
There were 431 people in hospital with 98 in intensive care, according to a provincial dashboard.
In Quebec on Wednesday, health officials reported 1,378 new COVID-19 cases and 22 more deaths attributed to the novel coronavirus, six of which occurred in the previous 24 hours.
Health officials said today hospitalizations increased by 39, to 573, and 84 patients were in intensive care, a rise of two.
From The Associated Press and Reuters and CBC News, last updated at 9:45 a.m. ET
More than 52 million cases of COVID-19 have been reported around the world with more than 34 million of those listed as recovered, according to a Johns Hopkins University case-tracking tool. The worldwide death toll stood at more than 1,286,000, the university reported.
In Africa, the top public health official says the continent has seen an average eight per cent rise in new coronavirus cases over the past month as infections creep up again in parts of the region of 1.3 billion people.
John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said “we expected it to happen,” and warned that when the virus comes back for a second wave, “it seems to come back with a lot of full force.” The African continent is approaching two million confirmed cases, including more than 45,000 deaths.
After several months of closure, four million students in Senegal returned to school on Thursday with health instructions to avoid spreading the coronavirus. (John Wessels/AFP/Getty Images)
Nkengasong said that “we are at a critical point in the response,” and again urged governments and citizens to follow public health measures. Testing across Africa remains a challenge, with 19 million tests conducted so far. Countries with the highest increase of cases in the past week include Congo at 37 per cent, Kenya at 34 per cent and Nigeria at 17 per cent.
In the Americas, Argentine President Alberto Fernandez and several of his ministers began preventative isolation after coming in close contact with an official infected with coronavirus.
Meanwhile, in the United States Dr. Anthony Fauci said he hopes a broad embrace of public health measures aimed at fighting COVID-19 will allow the country to avoid locking down.
“If you can do that well, you don’t have to take that step that people are trying to avoid, which has so many implications both psychologically and economically,” he said. “We’d like not to do that.”
Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told ABC’s Good Morning America on Thursday that vaccines being developed “are going to have a major positive impact” once they start being deployed. Health-care workers and some high-risk populations could receive vaccines as early as December or early next year, he said. The “ordinary citizen” may be able to get a vaccine sometime between the end of April and June.
In the meantime, Fauci said there are fundamental things Americans can do to stem the spread of the deadly virus. They include “universal and uniform” wearing of masks, avoiding crowds, keeping physical distance, doing as many activities as possible outdoors and washing hands. He said that sounds simple against a very difficult challenge but “it really does make a difference.”
Fauci’s message echoes that of president-elect Joe Biden, who this week signalled strongly that fighting the raging pandemic will be the immediate priority of his administration.
Medical staff members treat a patient suffering from coronavirus in the COVID-19 intensive care unit (ICU) at the United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, Texas, earlier this week. (Go Nakamura/Getty Images)
In the Middle East, hundreds of disillusioned doctors are leaving Lebanon amid falling wages and shortages of equipment, staff and even some basic supplies in hospitals as the country runs out of hard currency to pay for imports.
Emirates Group, the owner of the Middle East’s biggest air carrier, reported Thursday it lost $3.8 billion in the first half of the year, its first net loss in over three decades after the pandemic wiped out air travel.
In Europe, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has been hospitalized after testing positive for the novel virus. Spokesperson Iuliia Mendel told The Associated Press his symptoms remain mild and there is “nothing serious” in his condition. Zelensky disclosed Monday he contracted the virus.
Mendel said he was moved to a hospital in Kyiv because “there are better conditions for self-isolation and care for coronavirus patients.”
Zelensky’s chief of staff, defence minister and finance minister have been diagnosed with COVID-19.
On Wednesday, Ukraine’s government ordered non-essential businesses to shut down on weekends to stem the rapid growth of the outbreak.
Health officials reported another record 11,057 coronavirus cases on Thursday. Ukraine has reported a total of 500,865 confirmed cases and 9,145 deaths.
Dozens of hospital workers have held protests at hospitals in Greece, demanding more medical staff be hired as the country struggles to contain a resurgence of the coronavirus that has led to a new lockdown being imposed.
France’s prime minister said now is not the time to relax COVID-19 measures, a day after the country’s total reported cases overtook Russia to become the worst-affected country in Europe.
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Moscow’s mayor said city authorities were expecting cases to increase and that the situation with hospital beds could remain critical for some time, TASS news agency reported.
In the Asia-Pacific region, India has reported 47,905 new cases of coronavirus infection with New Delhi setting another daily record Thursday.
The surge of 8,593 cases in the nation’s capital is the highest for any major Indian city and comes as people crowd shopping areas ahead of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, on Saturday.
A security guard checks the body temperature of a customer outside a shop in a market in New Delhi on Thursday ahead of Diwali. (Money Sharma/AFP/Getty Images)
Deaths, too, are climbing again, with 85 in New Delhi in the past 24 hours. Deaths are a lagging indicator of the impact of the virus, due to long periods of illness and medical treatment.
Japan reported record new infections, while Tokyo Olympics organizers said athletes arriving for the Games will not have to isolate for 14 days.
CALGARY – MEG Energy says it earned $167 million in its third quarter, down from $249 million during the same quarter last year.
The company says revenues for the quarter were $1.27 billion, down from $1.44 billion during the third quarter of 2023.
Diluted earnings per share were 62 cents, down from 86 cents a year earlier.
MEG Energy says it successfully completed its debt reduction strategy, reducing its net debt to US$478 million by the end of September, down from US$634 million during the prior quarter.
President and CEO Darlene Gates said moving forward all the company’s free cash flow will be returned to shareholders through expanded share buybacks and a quarterly base dividend.
The company says its capital expenditures for the quarter increased to $141 million from $83 million a year earlier, mainly due to higher planned field development activity, as well as moderate capacity growth projects.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
Premier David Eby is proposing an all-party committee investigate mistakes made during the British Columbia election vote tally, including an uncounted ballot box and unreported votes in three-quarters of the province’s 93 ridings.
The proposal comes after B.C.’s chief electoral officer blamed extreme weather, long working hours and a new voting system for human errors behind the mistakes in last month’s count, though none were large enough to change the initial results.
Anton Boegman says the agency is already investigating the mistakes to “identify key lessons learned” to improve training, change processes or make recommendations for legislative change.
He says the uncounted ballot box containing about 861 votes in Prince George-Mackenzie was never lost, and was always securely in the custody of election officials.
Boegman says a failure in five districts to properly report a small number of out-of-district votes, meanwhile, rippled through to the counts in 69 ridings.
Eby says the NDP will propose that a committee examine the systems used and steps taken by Elections BC, then recommend improvements in future elections.
“I look forward to working with all MLAs to uphold our shared commitment to free and fair elections, the foundation of our democracy,” he said in a statement Tuesday, after a news conference by Boegman.
Boegman said if an independent review does occur, “Elections BC will, of course, fully participate in that process.”
He said the mistakes came to light when a “discrepancy” of 14 votes was noticed in the riding of Surrey-Guildford, spurring a review that increased the number of unreported votes there to 28.
Surrey-Guildford was the closest race in the election and the NDP victory there gave Eby a one-seat majority. The discovery reduced the NDP’s victory margin from 27 to 21, pending the outcome of a judicial review that was previously triggered because the race was so close.
The mistakes in Surrey-Guildford resulted in a provincewide audit that found the other errors, Boegman said.
“These mistakes were a result of human error. Our elections rely on the work of over 17,000 election officials from communities across the province,” he said.
“Election officials were working 14 hours or more on voting days and on final voting day in particular faced extremely challenging weather conditions in many parts of the province.
“These conditions likely contributed to these mistakes,” he said.
B.C.’s “vote anywhere” model also played a role in the errors, said Boegman, who said he had issued an order to correct the results in the affected ridings.
Boegman said the uncounted Prince George-Mackenzie ballot box was used on the first day of advance voting. Election officials later discovered a vote hadn’t been tabulated, so they retabulated the ballots but mistakenly omitted the box of first-day votes, only including ballots from the second day.
Boegman said the issues discovered in the provincewide audit will be “fully documented” in his report to the legislature on the provincial election, the first held using electronic tabulators.
He said he was confident election officials found all “anomalies.”
B.C. Conservative Party Leader John Rustad had said on Monday that the errors were “an unprecedented failure by the very institution responsible for ensuring the fairness and accuracy of our elections.”
Rustad said he was not disputing the outcomes as judicial recounts continue, but said “it’s clear that mistakes like these severely undermine public trust in our electoral process.”
Rustad called for an “independent review” to make sure the errors never happen again.
Boegman, who said the election required fewer than half the number of workers under the old paper-based system, said results for the election would be returned in 90 of the province’s 93 ridings on Tuesday.
Full judicial recounts will be held in Surrey-Guildford and Kelowna-Centre, while a partial recount of the uncounted box will take place in Prince George-Mackenzie.
Boegman said out-of-district voting had been a part of B.C.’s elections for many decades, and explained how thousands of voters utilized the province’s vote-by-phone system, calling it a “very secure model” for people with disabilities.
“I think this is a unique and very important part of our elections, providing accessibility to British Columbians,” he said. “They have unparalleled access to the ballot box that is not found in other jurisdictions in Canada.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
WINNIPEG – A public memorial honouring former judge, senator and chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into residential schools, Murray Sinclair, is set to take place in Winnipeg on Sunday.
The event, which is being organized by the federal and Manitoba governments, will be at Canada Life Centre, home of the NHL’s Winnipeg Jets.
Sinclair died Monday in a Winnipeg hospital at the age of 73.
A teepee and a sacred fire were set up outside the Manitoba legislature for people to pay their respects hours after news of his death became public. The province has said it will remain open to the public until Sinclair’s funeral.
Sinclair’s family continues to invite people to visit the sacred fire and offer tobacco.
The family thanked the public for sharing words of love and support as tributes poured in this week.
“The significance of Mazina Giizhik’s (the One Who Speaks of Pictures in the Sky) impact and reach cannot be overstated,” the family said in a statement on Tuesday, noting Sinclair’s traditional Anishinaabe name.
“He touched many lives and impacted thousands of people.”
They encourage the public to celebrate his life and journey home.
A visitation for extended family, friends and community is also scheduled to take place Wednesday morning.
Leaders from across Canada shared their memories of Sinclair.
Premier Wab Kinew called Sinclair one of the key architects of the era of reconciliation.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Sinclair was a teacher, a guide and a friend who helped the country navigate tough realities.
Sinclair was the first Indigenous judge in Manitoba — the second in Canada.
He served as co-chair of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba to examine whether the justice system was failing Indigenous people after the murder of Helen Betty Osborne and the police shooting death of First Nations leader J.J. Harper.
In leading the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he participated in hundreds of hearings across Canada and heard testimony from thousands of residential school survivors.
The commissioners released their widely influential final report in 2015, which described what took place at the institutions as cultural genocide and included 94 calls to action.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
