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What’s happening in Canada and around the world on Thursday

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Americans awoke on Thursday to celebrate a Thanksgiving Day transformed by the pandemic, with the Macy’s parade limited to a television-only event and many families resigned to meeting on video for turkey dinner.

The parade in New York has been scaled back significantly. The route is a block long, rather than more than four kilometres; balloon handlers have been replaced by specially rigged vehicles; and spectators will not be allowed to line the streets as before.

U.S. hospitalizations for COVID-19 reached a record 88,000 on Wednesday, and experts warn that Thanksgiving could significantly boost a death toll that has exceeded 260,000 nationwide.

With case numbers rising, health officials in the U.S. have urged people to avoid large gatherings over the holiday.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he knows it’s difficult to skip or change traditions.

“A sacrifice now could save lives and illness, and make the future much brighter as we get through this,” he said on Good Morning America on Wednesday.

He urged people to keep indoor gatherings small and stick with public health measures like wearing masks, physical distancing and avoiding crowds.

“That’s my final plea before the holiday.”


What’s happening across Canada

As of 10:30 a.m. ET on Thursday, Canada’s COVID-19 case count stood at 348,944, with 58,617 of those considered active cases. A CBC News tally of deaths based on provincial reports, regional health information and CBC’s reporting stood at 11,731.

British Columbia reported 13 additional deaths and 738 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday as hospitalizations in the province hit a new high. Health officials said 294 people were hospitalized, with 61 in critical care.

Health officials also noted that the record high case number reported earlier this week of 941 new cases was the result of a data collection error in the Fraser Health region. The correct number was actually far lower, at 695.

 

 

Alberta‘s death toll from COVID-19 has risen to 500 as case numbers in the province continue to climb, with 1,265 new cases reported on Wednesday.

“This is a tragic milestone,” Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Deena Hinshaw said of the deaths on Twitter. “My sympathies go out to the loved ones and friends who are mourning these lives lost during what is a very difficult time to grieve.”

The province — which had 13,719 active cases on Wednesday — also reported 355 COVID-19 hospitalizations, with 71 in intensive care.

Saskatchewan made changes to its COVID-19 restrictions on Wednesday, including restricting capacity for places like casinos and movie theatres and changing rules for restaurants.

Premier Scott Moe, who spoke from self-isolation after a possible COVID-19 exposure, has previously said he’s not in favour of a complete lockdown.

Saskatchewan reported 164 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday, bringing the number of active cases in the province to 3,012.

 

 

Despite a push from doctors in the province, Saskatchewan’s new rules to fight the COVID-19 pandemic appear to be more of a tweak than a tightening. 2:01

In Manitoba, a small hospital is temporarily closing so staff can be redeployed to help fight a COVID-19 outbreak at another facility. Staff from the Grandview Hospital will be sent to Grandview Personal Care Home “to assist in providing care and support for the residents and their families,” a statement from the local health authority said.

Health officials in Manitoba reported 349 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday and said hospitalizations had reached a new high of 303, with 50 in intensive care.

Ontario‘s premier is urging people to limit indoor holiday celebrations to their own household, saying “traditions will have to be adjusted” this year as the province battles the ongoing pandemic.

Doug Ford’s comments came on the heels of a report from Ontario’s auditor general that sharply criticized the province’s COVID-19 response.

 

Ontario Premier Doug Ford appealed to Ontarians to avoid large gatherings over the holidays to try to limit the spread of the coronavirus.   1:07

Ontario reported 1,478 new cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, with 572 in Peel Region and 356 in Toronto. The province reported 21 new deaths, bringing the provincial death toll to 3,575. Hospitalizations stood at 556, with 151 in intensive care, according to a provincial dashboard.

In Quebec, health officials on Wednesday reported 1,100 new COVID-19 cases and 28 more deaths attributed to the novel coronavirus. Health authorities said the number of hospitalizations remained stable at 655 and 93 people were in intensive care, a drop of three.

In Atlantic Canada, Nova Scotia reported 16 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday, New Brunswick reported three new cases, and both Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador reported one new case.

Across the North, Nunavut reported 11 new cases, while Yukon reported one new case. There were no new cases reported in the Northwest Territories.


What’s happening around the world

From The Associated Press and Reuters, last updated at 8:45 a.m. ET

 

Participants gather ahead of the 94th Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which is closed to spectators due to the spread of the coronavirus in New York City. (Andrew Kelley/Reuters)

 

As of early Thursday morning, there were nearly 60.5 million reported cases of COVID-19 worldwide with more than 38.8 million of those considered recovered or resolved, according to a Johns Hopkins University tracking tool. The global death toll stood at more than 1.4 million.

In Europe, Germany has passed the grim milestone of more than 15,000 deaths from the coronavirus. The Robert Koch Institute, the country’s disease control centre, said Thursday that another 389 deaths were recorded overnight, bringing the total since the start of the pandemic to 15,160.

Germany has seen 983,588 total cases of the coronavirus after adding 22,368 overnight, the agency said.

Germany embarked on a so-called “wave-breaker” shutdown on Nov. 2, closing restaurants, bars, sports and leisure facilities but leaving schools, shops and hair salons open.

It was initially slated to last four weeks, but Chancellor Angela Merkel and the country’s 16 state governors agreed late Wednesday to extend it through Dec. 20 with a goal of pushing the number of new coronavirus cases in each region below 50 per 100,000 inhabitants per week. It’s currently at 140 per 100,000.

Greece will extend its nationwide lockdown until Dec. 7 as COVID-19 cases continued to surge across the country, government spokesman Stelios Petsas said on Thursday.

 

A health-care worker disinfects a monitoring window in a COVID-19 intensive care unit at a hospital in an Athens suburb last week. (Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty Images)

 

Africa‘s top public health official says vaccinations against COVID-19 on the continent might not start until the second quarter of next year. And he says it will be “extremely dangerous” if more developed parts of the world vaccinate themselves and then restrict travel to people with proof of vaccination.

The director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, John Nkengasong, told reporters that, “I have seen how Africa is neglected when drugs are available” in the past. He warned that “it’s clear the second wave [of infections] is here on the continent” of 1.3 billion people.

Africa last week surpassed two million confirmed coronavirus infections. The Africa CDC has been discussing vaccine options with Russia, China and others. Nkengasong said that “the worst thing we want for the continent is for COVID to become an endemic disease” in Africa.

 

Two women walk past a COVID-19 graffiti in Soweto’s Orlando West township near Johannesburg earlier this month. South Africa has the most recorded cases of COVID-19 of any country in Africa. (Jerome Delay/The Associated Press)

 

In one hopeful development, authorities have begun distributing 2.7 million antigen tests throughout the continent, which Nkengasong said is “perhaps a game-changer” that allows for faster and easier testing. So far, some 21 million tests have been conducted across Africa’s 54 countries.

In the Americas, Mexico City has launched a test-and-trace approach to containing the coronavirus, after a rise in hospitalizations that has raised fears of a new economic lockdown.

In the Asia-Pacific region, South Korea reported 583 new cases, the highest since March, as it grapples with a third wave of infections that appears to be worsening despite tough new measures.

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga says that the next three weeks are going to be key for the country to stop further escalation of the surge in coronavirus infections that experts warn are putting medical systems on the verge of collapse.

Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike on Wednesday issued a request for an early closing time for places serving alcohol from Saturday to Dec. 17 and urged residents to avoid non-essential outings. On Thursday, she said the measures are needed “before the situation becomes even more serious.”

Japan survived the first wave in the spring without hard lockdowns.

India’s capital New Delhi is considering a nighttime curfew amid the latest coronavirus surge that has battered the city’s health-care system and overwhelmed its hospitals.

The New Delhi government on Thursday told this to a court that had questioned the administration on the measures being taken to control the spike in daily cases.

 

A worker sanitizes a Delhi Transport Corporation bus before it starts service in New Delhi, India on Wednesday. (Manish Swarup/The Associated Press)

 

The court was hearing a plea seeking to ramp up COVID-19 testing facilities in the capital, which has recorded the most number of cases from any state in India for the last three weeks and more than 100 fatalities on average every day for two consecutive weeks.

India’s new overall infections have declined steadily after peaking in mid-September, but the situation in the capital remains worrying.

India has recorded 9.26 million cases of coronavirus, second behind the U.S. More than 135,00 Indians have died because of the virus so far.

In the Middle East, Iran on Wednesday registered a daily record high of 13,843 new cases, the health ministry said, pushing the national tally to 894,385 in the Middle East’s worst-hit country.

 

 

 

Source: – CBC.ca

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STD epidemic slows as new syphilis and gonorrhea cases fall in US

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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.

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World’s largest active volcano Mauna Loa showed telltale warning signs before erupting in 2022

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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.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Waymo’s robotaxis now open to anyone who wants a driverless ride in Los Angeles

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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.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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