Quebec has recorded its first case of a new variant of COVID-19, the health minister said Tuesday, making it the fourth province in Canada to confirm the arrival of a new variant.
A statement from officials in Quebec said the person had been in contact with a family member who had returned to the province from the United Kingtom, where the new variant was first reported.
Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta had already reported cases of a new variant that health officials in England have said is more readily transmissible.
Quebec Health Minister Christian Dubé said that the arrival of the new variant doesn’t change the usual isolation measures.
Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta’s chief medical officer of health, said Monday that the person with the new variant, who had recently arrived from the U.K., did “everything they were supposed to do” by following quarantine and other public health measures.
“At this point, there is no evidence that there has been any further spread,” Hinshaw said.
A new variant has also been identified in South Africa. The Public Health Agency of Canada has said that while early data suggests the new variants “may be more transmissible, to date there is no evidence that these variants cause more severe disease symptoms or have any impact on antibody response.”
The health agency said more research is needed to confirm the findings.
As of 12:40 p.m. ET Tuesday, Canada’s COVID-19 case count stood at 562,085, with 74,457 of those cases considered active. A CBC News tally of deaths stood at 15,263.
In Ontario, vaccinations were expected to return to full operations today after being scaled down over the holidays. The province, which did not report case numbers on Monday, reported 4,492 cases for a two-day period on Tuesday.
Ontario is reporting 2,553 cases of <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/COVID19?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#COVID19</a> today, and 1,939 cases reported yesterday. Today, there are 895 new cases in Toronto, 496 in Peel, 147 in Windsor-Essex County, 144 in Hamilton and 142 in York Region.
In an update published on Tuesday, the province said there were 864 COVID-19 patients in hospital, with 304 in intensive care.
Quebec, meanwhile, reported 2,381 new cases, and 64 additional deaths. Hospitalizations in the province stood at 1,131, with 148 COVID-19 patients in ICU.
Yukon‘s Health and Social Services Minister Pauline Frost said the territory has received its first shipment of the Moderna vaccine and the arrival marks a turning point in Yukon’s fight against COVID-19.
Priority residents in the <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/NWT?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#NWT</a> will start receiving their first dose of the <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/Moderna?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#Moderna</a> vaccine in mid-January 2021. The <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/GNWT?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#GNWT</a> will release a vaccine roll out plan in early January with more details. [2/2] <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/nwtpoli?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#nwtpoli</a> <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/cdnpoli?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#cdnpoli</a> <a href=”https://t.co/e9zH3wd3Re”>pic.twitter.com/e9zH3wd3Re</a>
In Alberta, health officials on Monday said the province’s COVID-19 death toll had surpassed 1,000 as health officials reported 112 additional deaths over a five-day period.
Manitoba, which reported 107 new cases of COVID-19 and nine additional deaths, said Monday that it would slightly expand the criteria for health-care workers eligible to get the vaccination.
Here’s a look at some other COVID-19 developments from across Canada:
What’s happening in the U.S.
In California, officials said hospitalizations for COVID-19 have stabilized in parts of the state but still overwhelm hospitals elsewhere, and Gov. Gavin Newsom is warning of a new surge in coronavirus cases following heavy holiday travel in defiance of recommendations to avoid gatherings.
ICU units in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley have no capacity remaining. Newsom said the state has prepared for a new surge in cases by setting up hospital beds in arenas, schools and tents, though it is struggling to staff them.
California has been regularly breaking records for case counts, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19, while officials say models used for planning predict hospitalizations more than doubling in the next month from about 20,000 to more than 50,000.
The United States has seen more than 19.3 million cases of COVID-19 since the pandemic began and nearly 335,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.
WATCH | U.S. sees record COVID-19 deaths, hospitalizations in December:
CBC Toronto’s Chris Glover asks the chair of Ontario’s vaccine task force, retired general Rick Hillier, to justify the holiday stoppage of the province’s COVID-19 vaccine program. 8:33
President Donald Trump’s push for $2,000 US COVID-19 relief cheques now rests with the Senate after the House voted overwhelmingly to meet the president’s demand to increase the $600 stipends, but Republicans have shown little interest in boosting spending.
The outcome is highly uncertain heading into Tuesday’s session. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has declined to publicly address how he plans to handle the issue. But Democrats, sharing a rare priority with Trump, have seized on the opportunity to force Republicans into a difficult vote of either backing or defying the outgoing president.
–From The Associated Press and Reuters, last updated at 7:30 a.m. ET
What’s happening around the world
People wait for their turn to be vaccinated against COVID-19 at the makeshift vaccination centre erected at the Kuwait International Fairground in the Mishref suburb south of Kuwait City on Tuesday. (Yasser Al-Zayyat/AFP/Getty Images)
As of early Tuesday morning, more than 81.3 million cases of COVID-19 had been reported worldwide with more than 46 million cases considered recovered or resolved, according to the Johns Hopkins tracking database. The global death toll stood at more than 1.7 million.
In South Africa, the hardest-hit nation in Africa, officials have tightened COVID-19 restrictions, banning alcohol sales and extending a nationwide curfew, as infections shot through the one million mark, owing to a faster-spreading variant of the disease discovered in the country.
In the Middle East, Dubai is planning to inoculate 70 per cent of its population with the vaccine produced by Pfizer and BioNTech by the end of 2021, a health official said.
Israel’s health ministry said the country has vaccinated more people in nine days than have been infected with the coronavirus since the pandemic began. The ministry said Tuesday that nearly 500,000 people, or about five per cent of Israel’s population of 9 million, have already received the vaccine since the country began its inoculation drive last week. More than 407,000 people have caught the virus in Israel, and over 3,200 have died.
Edna Halup, a staff member at a private nursing home, receives a COVID-19 vaccine in Ganei Tikva, Israel. (Ariel Schalit/The Associated Press)
Israel is hoping a mass vaccination campaign will help bring its current outbreak under control and ultimately wipe out the virus entirely. This week the country entered its third national lockdown, with much of the economy shut down to help bring down surging infection numbers.
In the Asia-Pacific region, South Korea said 40 more coronavirus patients have died in the past 24 hours, the highest daily number since the pandemic began.
Officials also reported 1,046 new confirmed coronavirus infections Tuesday, taking the total caseload to 58,725, with 859 deaths. South Korea’s previous daily high for COVID-19 deaths was 24, reported on both Dec. 21 and Dec. 22.
Some observers have said surging fatalities reflect an increase in cluster infections at nursing homes and long-term care centres where elderly people with underlying health problems stay.
China has reported seven new cases of coronavirus infection in Beijing, where authorities have ordered the testing of hundreds of thousands of residents.
Cases have been clustered largely in villages on Beijing’s northeastern edge, but authorities are wary of any spread in the capital that could hurt claims it has all but contained local spread of the virus.
India has found six people who returned from the United Kingdom in recent weeks infected with a new variant of the coronavirus.
A health-care worker wearing personal protective equipment collects a swab sample from a Border Security Force soldier during a rapid antigen testing campaign for COVID-19 in Gandhinagar, India on Tuesday. (Amit Dave/Reuters)
The health ministry in a statement on Tuesday said that all the six patients were isolated and their fellow travellers were tracked down. Close contacts of the infected patients were also put under quarantine.
Health officials in southern Pakistan say they have detected the country’s first three cases of the virus variant that prompted strict new lockdown measures in Britain and global travel restrictions.
In Europe, more people are currently hospitalized with COVID-19 in England than at the first peak of the outbreak in the spring, official figures show.
There were 20,426 patients in hospitals as of Monday morning — the last day for which figures are available — compared to the previous high of 18,974 on April 12.
Simon Stevens, chief executive of Britain’s National Health Service, said health-care workers are back in “the eye of the storm” as they had been in the spring.
Ambulances line up outside Britain’s Royal London Hospital on Tuesday. England Health Service figures show hospitals now have more COVID-19 patients than during April’s first-wave peak, with fears of increased figures because of a Christmas social spread. (Dominic Lipinski/PA/The Associated Press)
British authorities are blaming a new variant of the coronavirus, first identified in southeast England, for soaring infection rates. Almost half of England’s population is under tight restrictions on movement and on everyday life in an attempt to curb the spread.
Stevens said vaccines provide hope, and estimated all vulnerable people in Britain could be inoculated against the coronavirus by late spring 2021.
German authorities said the coronavirus variant found in Britain has been detected in samples from two patients who were infected in northern Germany in November.
The health ministry in Lower Saxony state said late Monday that the samples were tested more thoroughly after news of the new variant emerged in Britain, regional public broadcaster NDR reported. They were taken in November from an elderly man with other medical conditions who later died and from his wife.
The ministry said the man’s daughter had been in England in mid-November and likely was infected there.
In the Americas, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said a vaccine would be available in the country within five days of being approved by federal health regulator Anvisa.
-From The Associated Press and Reuters, last updated at 8:50 a.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.
