TORONTO —
At Toronto’s University Health Network, there is now a COVID-19 vaccination clinic, where nearly 300 health-care workers were booked on Tuesday to get their first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
The clinic services five hospitals and long-term care facilities, including the one that personal support worker Charlie Speechley works at.
“It’s just been a long haul,” Speechley told CTV News. He said that the vaccine rollout was “exciting,” representing “the beginning of the end.”
“The end is now in sight,” he said.
This week, the first shipments of the COVID-19 vaccine arrived in Canada, ready to be doled out to health-care workers and others deemed high-priority.
The arrival of the vaccine brings hope, but a mass vaccine rollout takes a lot of choreography, particularly when the vaccine needs two doses to be effective, like the Pfizer vaccine.
The vaccination clinic is like a flu clinic on steroids, with extra steps to register and administer the inoculation — uncharted territory, according to the clinic organizer.
There are numerous challenges and questions, Leanna Graham told CTV News.
“How do they register, how do they screen, how do we upload the information,” Graham said. “The logistics around hiring staff for these clinics — all the infection control considerations.”
Graham is the director of Professional Practice & Policy at UHN, and she said this is “the first time we’ve ever done anything like this.”
“It’s been a tremendous amount of work,” she said, adding that they only put together a team to plan out how the vaccination clinic would function around a week ago.
Down the hall, the vaccines are prepared. The frozen vials are thawed out for half an hour, diluted with saline, and drawn up in a syringe.
Doses are registered with an expiration time, since they must be used within six hours of thawing. After that point, they’re no longer effective.
Jin Hyeun Huh, senior director of pharmacy at UHN, told CTV News that it’s a “daunting task.”
“This is not just this week, it will go on for pretty much the whole year of 2021,” he said.
The vaccine rollout has taken a huge amount of co-ordination, he pointed out, “not only within the hospital, but through the Ministry of Public Health Agencies, so the collaboration has been wonderful.
“Without that, I don’t think we would have made it.”
The clinic will be vaccinating a few hundred people each day, a number determined by how fast new batches of doses can be prepared and how many people can safely attend the clinic in a day.
Surveys show one third of Canadians are nervous about getting a shot, but that’s not the case here.
“I’m happy to get it, to be one of the first to get it,” Speechley said. The staff at his long-term care facility were asked if they were willing to take the plunge as some of the first recipients of the vaccine, and he “jumped on that.”
At his workplace, staff managed to keep residents safe from the virus, but several workers tested positive. At the beginning of the pandemic, the sense of urgency helped him stay functioning through “many shifts in a row,” but it’s been “tough,” he said.
“You can see it, […] the fatigue is there.”
Prashanthi Pidikiti, a physiotherapist at a long-term care facility, was also excited to get the vaccine. She’s doing this in part for herself, but mostly for others.
“If I can get some protection [for] myself and for the rest of the staff, for my colleagues, and also for the residents, then it would be great,” she said. “So that’s why I’m here.”
While some personal support workers are receiving the vaccine, others are also signing up to help deliver it. Robinah Kusiima, who works in long-term care, told CTV News she is now helping to administer the vaccine, because she feels it is critical work.
“I saw people dying in various nursing homes,” she said. “So I decided since the vaccine has come, let me be a part of it.”
After the jab, recipients are asked to wait for 15 minutes. As they leave, they get sheets confirming their vaccination and showing them where to call if they experience side-effects like severe fever.
The most important thing they receive before they leave the clinic? A date for dose number two.
“We have created a scheduling system that automatically generates a second appointment,” Graham said. “It’s 21 days after their first appointment.”
After someone receives their first dose, their second dose is kept in the freezer for safekeeping, rather than using up all of the supply at once and relying on further shipments for the second doses.
“We were given 3,000 doses, and we took a half of those, 1,500, and we’ll administer it over the next number of days and then the second 1,500 are saved in […] one of our deep freezer locations, and that will be administered again to the same recipients in three weeks,” Graham explained.
“So we have absolutely guaranteed that we have that second dose available for them.”
It’s a process that will be repeated many millions of times across the country as Canadians receive the vaccine that may help to stop the COVID-19 pandemic.
MONCTON, N.B. – New Brunswick RCMP say two youths have been arrested after an emergency alert was issued Monday evening about someone carrying a gun in the province’s southeast.
Caledonia Region Mounties say they were first called out to Main Street in the community of Salisbury around 7 p.m. on reports of a shooting.
A 48-year-old man was found at the scene suffering from gunshot wounds and he was rushed to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
Police say in the interest of public safety, they issued an Alert Ready message at 8:15 p.m. for someone driving a silver Ford F-150 pickup truck and reportedly carrying a firearm with dangerous intent in the Salisbury and Moncton area.
Two youths were arrested without incident later in the evening in Salisbury, and the alert was cancelled just after midnight Tuesday.
Police are still looking for the silver pickup truck, covered in mud, with possible Nova Scotia licence plate HDC 958. They now confirm the truck was stolen from Central Blissville.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
MISSISSAUGA, Ont. – Golf Canada has set an impressive stretch goal of having 30 professional golfers at the highest levels of the sport by 2032.
The World Junior Girls Golf Championship is a huge part of that target.
Credit Valley Golf and Country Club will host the international tournament from Sept. 30 to Oct. 5, with 24 teams representing 23 nations — Canada gets two squads — competing. Lindsay McGrath, a 17-year-old golfer from Oakville, Ont., said she’s excited to be representing Canada and continue to develop her game.
“I’m really grateful to be here,” said McGrath on Monday after a news conference in Credit Valley’s clubhouse in Mississauga, Ont. “It’s just such an awesome feeling being here and representing our country, wearing all the logos and being on Team Canada.
“I’ve always wanted to play in this tournament, so it’s really special to me.”
McGrath will be joined by Nobelle Park of Oakville, Ont., and Eileen Park of Red Deer, Alta., on Team Canada 2. All three earned their places through a qualifying tournament last month.
“I love my teammates so much,” said McGrath. “I know Nobelle and Eileen very well. I’m just so excited to be with them. We have such a great relationship.”
Shauna Liu of Maple, Ont., Calgary’s Aphrodite Deng and Clairey Lin make up Team Canada 2. Liu earned her exemption following her win at the 2024 Canadian Junior Girls Championship while Deng earned her exemption as being the low eligible Canadian on the world amateur golf ranking as of Aug. 7.
Deng was No. 175 at the time, she has since improved to No. 171 and is Canada’s lowest-ranked player.
“I think it’s a really great opportunity,” said Liu. “We don’t really get that many opportunities to play with people from across the world, so it’s really great to meet new people and play with them.
“It’s great to see maybe how they play and take parts from their game that we might also implement our own games.”
Golf Canada founded the World Junior Girls Golf Championship in 2014 to fill a void in women’s international competition and help grow its own homegrown talent. The hosts won for the first time last year when Vancouver’s Anna Huang, Toronto’s Vanessa Borovilos and Vancouver’s Vanessa Zhang won team gold and Huang earned individual silver.
Medallists who have gone on to win on the LPGA Tour include Brooke Henderson of Smiths Falls, Ont., who was fourth in the individual competition at the inaugural tournament. She was on Canada’s bronze-medal team in 2014 with Selena Costabile of Thornhill, Ont., and Calgary’s Jaclyn Lee.
Other notable competitors who went on to become LPGA Tour winners include Angel Yin and Megan Khang of the United States, as well as Yuka Saso of the Philippines, Sweden’s Linn Grant and Atthaya Thitikul of Thailand.
“It’s not if, it’s when they’re going to be on the LPGA Tour,” said Garrett Ball, Golf Canada’s chief operating officer, of how Canada’s golfers in the World Junior Girls Championship can be part of the organization’s goal to have 30 pros in the LPGA and PGA Tours by 2032.
“Events like this, like the She Plays Golf festival that we launched two years ago, and then the CPKC Women’s Open exemptions that we utilize to bring in our national team athletes and get the experience has been important in that pathway.”
The individual winner of the World Junior Girls Golf Championship will earn a berth in next year’s CPKC Women’s Open at nearby Mississaugua Golf and Country Club.
Both clubs, as well as former RBC Canadian Open host site Glen Abbey Golf Club, were devastated by heavy rains through June and July as the Greater Toronto Area had its wettest summer in recorded history.
Jason Hanna, the chief operating officer of Credit Valley Golf and Country Club, said that he has seen the Credit River flood so badly that it affected the course’s playability a handful of times over his nearly two decades with the club.
Staff and members alike came together to clean up the course after the flooding was over, with hundreds of people coming together to make the club playable again.
“You had to show up, bring your own rake, bring your own shovel, bring your own gloves, and then we’d take them down to the golf course, assign them to areas where they would work, and then we would do a big barbecue down at the halfway house,” said Hanna. “We got guys, like, 80 years old, putting in eight-hour days down there, working away.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
NEW YORK (AP) — Fenway Park has the Ted Williams seat. And now Citi Field has the Grimace seat.
The kid-friendly McDonald’s character made another appearance at the ballpark Monday, when the New York Mets unveiled a commemorative purple seat in section 302 to honor “his special connection to Mets fans.”
Wearing his pear-shaped purple costume and a baseball glove on backwards, Grimace threw out a funny-looking first pitch — as best he could with those furry fingers and short arms — before New York beat the Miami Marlins at Citi Field on June 12.
That victory began a seven-game winning streak, and Grimace the Mets’ good-luck charm soon went viral, taking on a life of its own online.
New York is 53-31 since June 12, the best record in the majors during that span. The Mets were tied with rival Atlanta for the last National League playoff spot as they opened their final homestand of the season Monday night against Washington.
The new Grimace seat in the second deck in right field — located in row 6, seat 12 to signify 6/12 on the calendar — was brought into the Shannon Forde press conference room Monday afternoon. The character posed next to the chair and with fans who strolled into the room.
The seat is available for purchase for each of the Mets’ remaining home games.
“It’s been great to see how our fanbase created the Grimace phenomenon following his first pitch in June and in the months since,” Mets senior vice president of partnerships Brenden Mallette said in a news release. “As we explored how to further capture the magic of this moment and celebrate our new celebrity fan, installing a commemorative seat ahead of fan appreciation weekend felt like the perfect way to give something back to the fans in a fun and unique way.”
Up in Boston, the famous Ted Williams seat is painted bright red among rows of green chairs deep in the right-field stands at Fenway Park to mark where a reported 502-foot homer hit by the Hall of Fame slugger landed in June 1946.
So, does this catapult Grimace into Splendid Splinter territory?
“I don’t know if we put him on the same level,” Mets executive vice president and chief marketing officer Andy Goldberg said with a grin.
“It’s just been a fun year, and at the same time, we’ve been playing great ball. Ever since the end of May, we have been crushing it,” he explained. “So I think that added to the mystique.”
