Quebec Premier François Legault announced Tuesday that Dr. Luc Boileau will be the province’s interim public health director, after Dr. Horacio Arruda, a key leader in the province’s pandemic response, tendered his resignation Monday.
Boileau, the current head of the province’s health-care research institute, the INESSS, takes on this new role as the Omicron wave continues to overwhelm hospitals across the province, forcing the health-care network to postpone surgeries and other medical services.
Legault thanked Arruda on Tuesday, noting he was in the difficult position of explaining public health decisions and said he’d grown close to him throughout the last 22 months of the pandemic.
“Being in front of the media every day and explaining these decisions is not easy for anyone,” Legault said. “I think there are advantages to having someone new after all those months, to take on those responsibilities.”
Quebec’s outgoing top doctor, Dr. Horacio Arruda, left, was often by Legault’s side during COVID-19 news conferences. (Ivanoh Demers/Radio-Canada)
Legault said Arruda would take a couple weeks to rest before returning to help out in another role that has yet to be decided on.
Arruda wrote in a letter dated Monday that his office has offered public health opinions and recommendations amid uncertainty and based on the best available knowledge and various expert opinions. But he acknowledged there was a “certain erosion” in public support for health measures.
“In such a context, I consider it appropriate to offer you the possibility of replacing me before the end of my term of office,” the letter said.
WATCH | ‘Health contribution’ payment coming for unvaccinated Quebecers:
Quebec to force unvaccinated to pay ‘health contribution’
3 hours ago
Duration 0:53
Adults in Quebec who refuse to be vaccinated for non-medical reasons and don’t have a medical exemption will face a new health care ‘contribution,’ says Quebec Premier François Legault. 0:53
Legault also said Tuesday that adults who refuse to get their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine in the coming weeks will have to pay a “health care contribution,” noting that unvaccinated people are currently straining the health care system.
Legault did not say when the tax would take effect or how much it would cost, but he did say he wanted it to be significant enough to act as incentive to get vaccinated — more than $50 or $100, he said. Legault said details would be revealed “in the coming weeks.”
In Quebec on Tuesday, the health ministry reported 62 additional deaths, bringing the death toll in the province to 12,028. Health officials also reported 2,742 hospitalizations — a pandemic high for the province — with 255 people in intensive care.
Lab-based testing in the province is no longer widely accessible, but the province on Tuesday reported an additional 8,710 lab-confirmed cases.
In recent weeks, the province has brought back several stringent health measures, including a curfew for a second year in a row, amid rising infections and hospitalizations.
-From The Canadian Press, with a file from CBC News, last updated at 2:10 p.m. ET
What’s happening across Canada
WATCH | New safety measures for Toronto schoolkids:
Ontario schools prepare to return to class on Monday
8 hours ago
Duration 9:26
Canada’s largest school board, the Toronto District School Board, says there are new safety measures in place for children’s return to the classroom, but the TDSB is still struggling with how to count COVID-19 case numbers and let parents know. (Frédéric Pepin/CBC/Radio-Canada) 9:26
With lab-based testing capacity deeply strained and increasingly restricted, experts say true case counts are likely far higher than reported. Hospitalization data at the regional level is also evolving, with several provinces saying they will report figures that separate the number of people in hospital because of COVID-19 from those in hospital for another medical issue who also test positive for COVID-19.
For more information on what is happening in your community — including details on outbreaks, testing capacity and local restrictions — click through to the regional coverage below.
In Central Canada, Ontario students will return to classrooms next Monday after pivoting to remote learning after the holiday break — a sudden shift that sparked heated debate.
Students are set to be back in classrooms “as planned and previously announced,” Ivana Yelic, Premier Doug Ford’s director of media relations, said in an emailed statement.
The province’s health-care system has been under increasing strain in recent weeks due to the highly transmissible Omicron variant, which has also caused staffing shortages across several sectors.
WATCH | Ontario Health redeploying personnel:
Absenteeism the ‘acute’ health-care challenge, says Ontario Health CEO
3 hours ago
Duration 2:51
While absenteeism is the big strain on Ontario’s health-care system right now, redeploying personnel and a new program for international volunteers should help fill in any gaps, says Ontario Health CEO Matthew Anderson. 2:51
Ontario on Tuesday reported 21 additional deaths and a total of 3,220 hospitalizations. More detail about intensive care units is expected later, Health Minister Christine Elliott said on Twitter.
Of the people in ICU with <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/COVID19?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#COVID19</a>, 83% were admitted to the ICU for <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/COVID?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#COVID</a>-19 and 17% were admitted for other reasons but have tested positive for COVID-19.<br><br>Some ICU-related data is currently unavailable. This data will be available shortly.
Health officials in Yukon, meanwhile, said on Monday that people who develop symptoms of COVID-19 and aren’t eligible for a lab-based PCR test can pick up a rapid test at a drive-thru location in Whitehorse.
In Atlantic Canada, Nova Scotia on Monday reported three additional COVID-19 deaths and 59 hospitalizations, with two people in intensive care units. The update came as the province — which recently shifted temporarily to remote education — reported an additional 816 lab-confirmed COVID-19 cases.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, health officials on Monday reported two additional deaths and four COVID-19 hospitalizations. Health officials reported a total of 1,135 cases on Monday — but that figure included 680 positives that had been sent for testing at out-of-province labs because of capacity issues. More results from out of province are expected in the days ahead, the health minister said.
In Prince Edward Island, five people were in hospital being treated for COVID-19, health officials reported Monday, including one in intensive care. The province also reported 320 additional cases since the last update on Saturday.
People wait outside a vaccine clinic at a mall in Fredericton on Monday as booster dose eligibility in New Brunswick was expanded to everyone aged 18 and up. (Jocelyn Elsdon/CBC)
Meanwhile, hospitalizations in New Brunswick hit a pandemic high on Tuesday, with 88 people in hospital, including 14 in ICU. The province, which reported 220 lab-confirmed cases on Monday, has expanded booster dose eligibility to adults over the age of 18.
In the Prairie provinces, Manitoba health officials on Monday said there were 378 people hospitalized due to COVID-19, with 39 in intensive care units. The province, which reported 19 additional deaths over a period of three days, saw 7,083 lab-confirmed cases since the last update.
In Saskatchewan, the total hospitalizations stood at 119 on Monday, health officials reported, with 11 in ICU. There were no additional deaths reported on Monday, as the province recorded 1,069 additional lab-confirmed COVID-19 cases.
Alberta, on Tuesday reported 635 COVID-19 hospitalizations, with 72 people in ICU. The update came as the province reported six additional deaths since its update last week, and 17,577 additional lab-confirmed cases.
In British Columbia, provincial health officials on Monday reported that COVID-19 hospitalizations stood at 431, with 95 people in intensive care units. The update came as the province’s health ministry reported seven additional deaths since last week’s update, along with 6,966 more lab-confirmed cases.
-From CBC News and The Canadian Press, last updated at 3:00 p.m. ET
What’s happening around the world
A member of the vaccination team prepares a shot for a patient as Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson makes a constituency visit to Boots pharmacy on Monday in Uxbridge, England. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)
As of early Tuesday afternoon, roughly 311.1 million cases of COVID-19 had been reported worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University’s coronavirus tracker. The reported global death toll stood at more than 5.4 million.
In Europe, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson faced a wave of public and political outrage on Tuesday over allegations that he and his staff flouted coronavirus lockdown rules by holding a garden party in 2020 while Britons were barred by law from mingling outside the home.
Meanwhile, in Italy, the latest wave of COVID-19 cases is increasing pressure on hospitals and jeopardizing the treatment of some 11 million cancer patients, a medical association said on Tuesday.
“The postponement of surgery may lead to the development of tumours in more advanced stages, with less chance of a cure,” the Federation of Oncologists, Cardiologists and Haematologists (FOCE) said in an appeal published on its website. The organization said Italy’s hospitals suffered from a lack of investment and inadequate staffing levels.
In the Americas, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and State Department advised against travel to neighbouring Canada, and the Washington Post reported that it is considering recommending better masks.
In Mexico, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador announced he had contracted COVID-19 for a second time, saying he had a mild case and would keep working in isolation until he had recovered.
WATCH | COVID-19: How long does immunity last after Omicron?
COVID-19: How long does immunity last after Omicron?
19 hours ago
Duration 2:21
Dr. Peter Juni, scientific director of Ontario’s COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, talks to Andrew Chang about how long immunity may last after acquiring the Omicron variant and its impact on if people can transmit the virus. 2:21
In the Asia-Pacific region, a third Chinese city has locked down its residents because of a COVID-19 outbreak, raising the number confined to their homes in China to about 20 million people. The lockdown of Anyang, home to 5.5 million people, was announced late Monday after two cases of the Omicron variant were reported. Residents are not allowed to go out and stores have been ordered shut except those selling necessities.
Another 13 million people have been locked down in Xi’an for nearly three weeks, and 1.1 million more in Yuzhou for more than a week. It wasn’t clear how long the lockdown of Anyang would last, as it was announced as a measure to facilitate mass testing of residents, which is standard procedure in China’s strategy of identifying and isolating infected people as quickly as possible.
The lockdowns are the broadest since the shutting down of Wuhan and most of the rest of Hubei province in early 2020 at the start of the pandemic. Since then, China’s approach has evolved into one of targeting smaller areas hit by outbreaks for lockdowns.
The approach of the Winter Olympics, which open Feb. 4 in Beijing, and the emergence of Omicron have brought back citywide lockdowns in a bid to snuff out outbreaks and prevent them from spreading to other parts of China.
In Africa, health officials in South Africa on Monday reported 2,409 additional cases and 77 deaths.
In the Middle East, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said he had tested positive but was in good health.
-From Reuters, The Associated Press and CBC News, last updated at 1:45 p.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.
