Biden administration will begin providing COVID-19 vaccines to U.S. pharmacies, part of its plan to ramp up vaccinations.
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Britain begins a door-to-door COVID-19 testing of 80,000 people on Tuesday in a bid to stem the spread of a variant of the novel coronavirus first identified in South Africa.
Public Health England said it had identified a total of 105 cases of the variant since Dec. 22, and to contain new outbreaks, residents in eight areas of the country will now be tested whether or not they are showing symptoms, a process known as “surge testing.”
There are about 10,000 people in each area, three of which are in London, two of which are in the southeast, one of which is in central England, one of which is in the east and another of which is in the northwest.
Those in the affected areas will be tested, even if they are asymptomatic, to break any chain of transmission in the community.
“It is concerning — it’s deeply concerning,” junior education minister Michelle Donelan told Sky. “It’s still a very perilous stage of this virus and we’ve got these new variants spreading.”
The number of new coronavirus cases in Britain is levelling out or falling after a surge in infections at the end of last year, fuelled by a more transmissible variant found in the southeast of England.
Britain is rolling out a mass vaccination program, with nearly 9.3 million people having received the first shot, and the government and health officials are concerned new variants would undermine its efforts to bring the pandemic under control.
However, there has been criticism that ministers have been too slow to bring in measures to quarantine travellers arriving from overseas who might bring new strains of the virus with them.
People get tested in Walsall, England, as local authorities prepare to deploy more testing in a bid to track down a COVID-19 variant found in the area. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
Scientists have said the variant first detected in South Africa appears to be more transmissible, but there is no evidence that it causes more severe disease. However, several laboratory studies have found that it reduces vaccine and antibody therapy efficacy.
The United Kingdom has seen more than 3.8 million cases of COVID-19 and more than 106,000 deaths since the pandemic began, according to Johns Hopkins University.
On Tuesday, the world learned that Capt. Tom Moore, the British Second World War veteran who raised millions of pounds for health service workers on the frontline of the battle against COVID-19, had died at age 100.
“It is with great sadness that we announce the death of our dear father, Captain Sir Tom Moore,” his daughters said in a statement.
-From Reuters, last updated at 11:15 a.m. ET
What’s happening in Canada
WATCH | Some say travel restrictions are not enough to prevent COVID-19 spread
New federal travel restrictions take effect this week, including mandatory quarantine in a hotel and a temporary suspension on Canadian airline flights to Mexico and the Caribbean, but some experts already say the plan has too many holes to be truly effective. 2:48
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the government has inked a deal that will see COVID-19 vaccines churned out on home soil. Trudeau said the federal government has signed a memorandum of understanding with Novavax to start producing immunization doses at the Royalmount facility in Montreal.
The Novavax vaccine is currently under review by Health Canada. If approved, it would eventually leave Canada less reliant on foreign production for the most sought-after product in the world.
Trudeau also says the government is investing $25 million in Vancouver-based biotechnology company Precision NanoSystems to build a manufacturing centre, with the ultimate goal of producing up to 240 million vaccine doses per year.
Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, said at a briefing Tuesday that national daily case counts have been declining over the past two to three weeks, but cautioned that communities need to remain vigilant and follow public health measures aimed at slowing transmission.
“We must hold fast to these measures to prevent re-acceleration of the epidemic and limit the spread of more infectious virus variants,” Tam said.
WATCH | Variants could change Canada’s COVID-19 situation ‘rapidly,’ experts say
Even as overall COVID-19 numbers continue to trend downward across Canada, health officials are increasingly concerned about the spread of two variants: one first detected in the U.K. and another in South Africa, which experts say could ‘rapidly’ change the situation in Canada. 2:05
To date, provinces have reported over 135 cases of the B117 variant first reported in the U.K., and at least 13 cases of the B1351 variant first reported in South Africa, Tam said.
“We’re in a very delicate period right now, where vaccines are just beginning to roll out,” she said. “So I think the message is really, ‘Hang on in there for a bit longer,’ so that the vaccine programs can accelerate.”
Relaxation of restrictions needs to happen “very cautiously,” and take into account the public health system’s capacity and the local health-care system’s capacity, she said.
As of 2:30 p.m ET on Tuesday, Canada had reported 785,497 cases of COVID-19 — with 49,679 considered active. A CBC News tally of deaths stood at 20,186.
Ontario saw a substantial drop in its reported COVID-19 numbers on Tuesday, but officials said a data migration by Toronto Public health had an impact on the numbers. Health Minister Christine Elliott reported just 745 cases of COVID-19 on Tuesday. Hospitalizations stood at 1,192, with 341 people in intensive care units.
“Please note that Toronto Public Health has now migrated all of their data to the provincial data system, CCM,” Elliott said in a tweet. “This migration has impacted today’s daily counts, resulting in an underestimation of cases. We anticipate fluctuations in case numbers over the next few days.”
The province on Monday recorded its first case of the COVID-19 variant first identified in South Africa, saying a case was detected in Peel Region.
Ontario’s top doctor said the person neither travelled nor had any known contact with anyone who travelled.
Data from South Africa shows the variant may be more infectious, Dr. David Williams said.
Ontario, which reported 1,969 new cases of COVID-19 on Monday, had reported a total of 69 total cases of the variant first reported in the U.K. as of Sunday.
Meanwhile, New Brunswick has reported its first cases of the coronavirus variant initially detected in the U.K. Two cases were detected in the Saint John region, and one in the Miramichi region. Two of the cases are related to international travel and one is related to travel in Canada.
“The arrival of the variant will put more pressure on our health system,” Dr. Jennifer Russell, chief medical officer of health, said. “It is a very fast-moving strain and it will be difficult to get ahead of it.”
The province reported 25 new cases on Tuesday, the majority of them in the Edmundston region.
In other provincial updates, Nova Scotia reported one new case on Tuesday. In the North, the Northwest Territories reported two new cases and Nunuvat reported none. Manitoba reported 83 new cases, with the majority in the Northern health region.
Quebec Premier François Legault is expected to announce some changes to COVID-19 restrictions later Tuesday.
The province reported 1,053 new cases of COVID-19 and 38 deaths on Tuesday. Hospitalizations stood at 1,110, according to a provincial dashboard, with 178 people in intensive care units.
Tuesday’s update comes a day after health officials in Quebec reported 890 new cases — the first time since early November that Quebec has reported fewer than 1,000 daily new cases.
Here’s a look at what’s happening across the country:
-From The Canadian Press and CBC News, last updated at 2:30 p.m. ET
What’s happening around the world
As of early Tuesday morning, more than 103.4 million cases of COVID-19 had been reported worldwide with more than 57.4 million of those cases considered recovered or resolved, according to a Johns Hopkins University tracking tool. The global death toll stood at more than 2.2 million.
In Europe, Estonia said it will allow passengers arriving to the country with a proof of COVID-19 vaccination to omit the quarantine requirement. Health officials of the Baltic country said that proof isn’t restricted only to those vaccine suppliers approved in the European Union but proof from any of the global vaccine suppliers would be accepted. However, Estonia’s health board said that certificate of vaccination from foreign nationals has to meet certain criteria, including language.
Vaccination certificates must be in either in Estonian, Russian — which is widely spoken in Estonia — or English. Hanna Sepp, head of the Health Board’s infectious diseases unit, told the Estonian public broadcaster ERR that the certificate has to indicate the disease against which the person has been vaccinated, when the vaccine was formulated and which manufacturer’s vaccine was used. It also has to include data on the issuer of the vaccine and the vaccine batch number.
Children in classes up to fourth grade will return to school Feb. 8 in Denmark after the country saw a steady reduction in new COVID-19 infections in recent weeks. Health Minister Magnus Heunicke said it was “a careful reopening,” noting the Scandinavian country is still dealing with the virus variant first reported in Britain that has been spreading in Denmark despite overall declining numbers of new infections.
Staff at schools will undergo regular testing and parents will be required to wear face masks on school sites. Denmark has recorded 2,145 deaths and 198,960 cases.
In the Middle East, Dubai will start vaccinating people with the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, the state media office said on Tuesday as the United Arab Emirates battles its biggest outbreak since the pandemic began.
The first shipment has arrived from India, the state media office said in a tweet. It did not provide details on how many doses were received or when inoculations would start.
In Africa, Zimbabwe will have access to a Chinese COVID-19 vaccine soon, China’s ambassador in Harare said, as Beijing ramps up its availability to developing nations.
In the Asia-Pacific region, Malaysia’s government extended a lockdown and broad movement restrictions by two weeks as a surge in infections has pushed the cumulative total past 200,000 cases.
Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced Tuesday that he is extending a coronavirus state of emergency in Tokyo and nine other areas through March 7, amid growing uncertainty over the national rollout of vaccines and the hosting of the Tokyo Olympics this summer.
People walk along Nakamise Shopping Street near Sensoji Temple, normally a hugely popular destination for foreign tourists, on Tuesday in Tokyo. (Carl Court/Getty Images)
Under the state of emergency, the government has issued non-binding requests for people to avoid crowds and eating out in groups, and for restaurants and bars to close by 8 p.m.
New cases have declined in Tokyo and nationwide since early January, but experts say hospitals remain flooded with serious cases and that preventive measures should remain in place.
Japan has had about 400,000 coronavirus cases, including 5,800 deaths.
“I seek your co-operation to endure just a bit longer,” Suga said. “We must make sure the infections are on a continuous decline.”
The emergency will end Sunday as planned in one prefecture, Tochigi, which is north of Tokyo, where the situation has improved. It will remain in place in Tokyo and its neighbours Saitama, Chiba and Kanagawa, as well as in Osaka, Kyoto, Hyogo and Fukuoka in the west, and Aichi and Gifu in central Japan.
The World Health Organization experts have visited an animal disease centre in the Chinese city of Wuhan as part of their investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. A team member said they met with staff in charge of the health of livestock in Hubei province, toured laboratories and had an “in-depth” discussion with questions and answers.
Meanwhile, WHO officials in Geneva were pushing back against suggestions the team was not getting enough access or data. The officials said the agency was continuing to ask for more data. They also said the team planned to visit the Wuhan Institute of Virology, considered among the major sources of information about the origins of the coronavirus.
China reported the fewest new COVID-19 cases in a month as imported cases overtook local infections, official data showed on Tuesday, suggesting its worst wave since March 2020 is being stamped out ahead of an important holiday.
In the Americas, the Biden administration will begin providing COVID-19 vaccines to U.S. pharmacies, part of its plan to ramp up vaccinations as new and potentially more serious virus strains are starting to appear.
A White House announcement was expected Tuesday, a person familiar with the plan told The Associated Press. The person spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of the official announcement.
Initially the government will be shipping limited quantities of vaccine to drugstores around the country, but that’s expected to accelerate as drugmakers increase production. Drugstores have become a mainstay for flu shots and shingles vaccines, and the industry is capable of vaccinating tens of millions of people monthly.
The partnership with drug stores was originally announced by the Trump administration last November. At that time, no coronavirus vaccines had been approved.
The U.S. government also promised undocumented migrants the same access to COVID-19 vaccines as other civilians and said inoculation centres would be immigration enforcement-free zones.
-From The Associated Press and Reuters, last updated at 12:20 p.m. ET
Have questions about this story? We’re answering as many as we can in the comments.
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.
