COVID-19 variants still of concern as B.C. reports 1236 new cases over weekend - Kamloops This Week | Canada News Media
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COVID-19 variants still of concern as B.C. reports 1236 new cases over weekend – Kamloops This Week

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B.C. saw 1,236 new cases of COVID-19 over the three-day weekend reporting period, an average of 412 new cases per day.

The province is down to 3,976 active cases, down below the 4,000-case mark for the first time since early November, when daily case counts began shooting upwards.

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The number of British Columbians in hospital has fallen some, as well, down to 234 in hospital with 69 of those patients in critical care.

The province also reported 13 additional deaths, bringing the province’s death toll to 1,259 since the pandemic began.

Of the new cases, 152 are in those who live in the Interior Health region. That figure is on par with recent weeks, with the region averaging around 50 new cases per day.

Outbreaks in the city continue to produce cases.

The outbreak at Royal Inland Hospital now stands at 102 total cases, affecting 66 staff and 36 patients, with 46 cases still active. Interior Health says the outbreak has been contained to the hospital’s COVID-19 ward.

The most recent outbreak, at group home Westsyde Care Residences, has produced 26 cases, with 24 of those still active. Affected there are 14 residents and 12 staff.

Brocklehurst Gemstone Care Home, meanwhile, stands at 25 total cases with two active cases remaining.

Elsewhere in the province there were 266 new cases in Vancouver Coastal Health, 601 in Fraser Health, 86 in Vancouver Island Health and 131 in Northern Health.

The province has now had 70,952 total cases. Of those, 65,605 have recovered.

Another 6,900 people are under active public health monitoring due to exposure to confirmed cases.

Variants of concern

During Monday’s update from Health Minister Adrian Dix and Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry, the concern over variant strains of the virus continued.

Henry said the province now has 40 variant cases, but only three remain active.

Of those cases, 25 are the U.K. variant, with 15 in the Fraser Health region, five in Vancouver Coastal Health and one in Interior Health.

Most of the U.K. variant cases are related to Travel, Henry said, but one remains of unknown origin.

The South Africa variant has produced 15 cases in B.C., with 13 in Vancouver Coastal Health and two in Fraser Health. Henry said it is “concerning for us” that four of those cases remain of unknown origin.

She said public health has done extensive contact tracing on these cases and she is confident there has been no onward spread.

Henry said further spread of the variants would be a game changer.

“What we have seen in places around the world … is that it does change the game in some ways if it starts spreading in the community,” she said.

“I think some of us are dreading that.”

On the vaccine front, supply-related delays continue, but Henry said she expects vaccine shipments to the province will increase every week this month.

To date, the province has administered 154,496 doses of either the Pfizer of Moderna vaccines, with 12,111 of those being second doses.

Henry said she anticipates B.C. will be able to fully start its mass vaccination campaign in March for those age 80 and older.

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Whooping cough is at a decade-high level in US

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MILWAUKEE (AP) — Whooping cough is at its highest level in a decade for this time of year, U.S. health officials reported Thursday.

There have been 18,506 cases of whooping cough reported so far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. That’s the most at this point in the year since 2014, when cases topped 21,800.

The increase is not unexpected — whooping cough peaks every three to five years, health experts said. And the numbers indicate a return to levels before the coronavirus pandemic, when whooping cough and other contagious illnesses plummeted.

Still, the tally has some state health officials concerned, including those in Wisconsin, where there have been about 1,000 cases so far this year, compared to a total of 51 last year.

Nationwide, CDC has reported that kindergarten vaccination rates dipped last year and vaccine exemptions are at an all-time high. Thursday, it released state figures, showing that about 86% of kindergartners in Wisconsin got the whooping cough vaccine, compared to more than 92% nationally.

Whooping cough, also called pertussis, usually starts out like a cold, with a runny nose and other common symptoms, before turning into a prolonged cough. It is treated with antibiotics. Whooping cough used to be very common until a vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, which is now part of routine childhood vaccinations. It is in a shot along with tetanus and diphtheria vaccines. The combo shot is recommended for adults every 10 years.

“They used to call it the 100-day cough because it literally lasts for 100 days,” said Joyce Knestrick, a family nurse practitioner in Wheeling, West Virginia.

Whooping cough is usually seen mostly in infants and young children, who can develop serious complications. That’s why the vaccine is recommended during pregnancy, to pass along protection to the newborn, and for those who spend a lot of time with infants.

But public health workers say outbreaks this year are hitting older kids and teens. In Pennsylvania, most outbreaks have been in middle school, high school and college settings, an official said. Nearly all the cases in Douglas County, Nebraska, are schoolkids and teens, said Justin Frederick, deputy director of the health department.

That includes his own teenage daughter.

“It’s a horrible disease. She still wakes up — after being treated with her antibiotics — in a panic because she’s coughing so much she can’t breathe,” he said.

It’s important to get tested and treated with antibiotics early, said Dr. Kris Bryant, who specializes in pediatric infectious diseases at Norton Children’s in Louisville, Kentucky. People exposed to the bacteria can also take antibiotics to stop the spread.

“Pertussis is worth preventing,” Bryant said. “The good news is that we have safe and effective vaccines.”

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AP data journalist Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Scientists show how sperm and egg come together like a key in a lock

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How a sperm and egg fuse together has long been a mystery.

New research by scientists in Austria provides tantalizing clues, showing fertilization works like a lock and key across the animal kingdom, from fish to people.

“We discovered this mechanism that’s really fundamental across all vertebrates as far as we can tell,” said co-author Andrea Pauli at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna.

The team found that three proteins on the sperm join to form a sort of key that unlocks the egg, allowing the sperm to attach. Their findings, drawn from studies in zebrafish, mice, and human cells, show how this process has persisted over millions of years of evolution. Results were published Thursday in the journal Cell.

Scientists had previously known about two proteins, one on the surface of the sperm and another on the egg’s membrane. Working with international collaborators, Pauli’s lab used Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence tool AlphaFold — whose developers were awarded a Nobel Prize earlier this month — to help them identify a new protein that allows the first molecular connection between sperm and egg. They also demonstrated how it functions in living things.

It wasn’t previously known how the proteins “worked together as a team in order to allow sperm and egg to recognize each other,” Pauli said.

Scientists still don’t know how the sperm actually gets inside the egg after it attaches and hope to delve into that next.

Eventually, Pauli said, such work could help other scientists understand infertility better or develop new birth control methods.

The work provides targets for the development of male contraceptives in particular, said David Greenstein, a genetics and cell biology expert at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study.

The latest study “also underscores the importance of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry,” he said in an email.

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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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