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LARGEST SINGLE-DAY JUMP: Seven more COVID-19 deaths in Ottawa – Ottawa Sun

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All seven were linked to outbreaks at area long-term care and retirement residences.

Seven more COVID-19-related deaths were reported in Ottawa on Friday, bringing the city’s total to 21.

It was the city’s largest single-day jump in reported deaths since the outbreak of the pandemic.

Two of the deaths occurred on Monday, one on Tuesday and four on Wednesday, said Ottawa Public Health.

The new deaths were all related to outbreaks in long-term care and retirement homes, bringing the total COVID-19-related deaths in those facilities to 12.

“My thoughts are with the family members, friends, and caregivers of the people who have died,” Ottawa chief medical officer Dr. Vera Etches said in a statement. “OPH continues to work with health-care partners to ensure long-term-care and retirement homes are a top priority for protection.”

Additionally, 50 new confirmed cases were reported in Ottawa on Friday, bringing the total to 728.


An unidentified couple walk near Dow’s Lake and in front of a sign in praise of front-line health-care workers on Friday.

Tony Caldwell /

Postmedia

“An increase in testing might contribute, in part, to the increase in newly identified cases,” Ottawa Public Health said.

Among those recently diagnosed is a staff member at the Perley and Rideau Veterans’ Health Centre, the second there to test positive in as many days.

OC Transpo reported Thursday afternoon that one of its drivers also tested positive for COVID-19, the third driver and fifth employee of the agency to so far do so.

Of 37 COVID-19 patients currently in hospital in Ottawa, 13 are in intensive care, down from 43 hospitalized patients and 17 ICU patients as of Thursday.

Meanwhile, 42 per cent of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Ottawa have been resolved, with many patients’ symptoms clearing up and isolation no longer required.

Etches also praised Ottawa residents for their resiliency in maintaining physical distancing and other measures to help limit the spread of COVID-19. “There would be more cases of COVID-19 in our community had everyone not done their part over the past month,” she said. “Please keep up this hard work over the next stretch of timeThank you again for all the actions you are taking as a community — these actions are saving lives.”

Quebec health officials reported the first COVID-19 death in the Outaouais on Friday. No additional details were released.

The Centre intégré de santé et de services sociaux de l’Outaouais reported there had been 192 cases in the region so far, with 149 of those cases in the city of Gatineau, 25 in MRC de Papineau, 12 in MRC des Collines-de-l’Outaouais and five or less in each of MRC de la Vallée-de-la-Gatineau and MRC du Pontiac. As of Friday, there were nine hospitalizations, including four people in intensive care.

The National Capital Commission, meanwhile, announced Friday that it would launch a pilot project closing the Queen Elizabeth Driveway between Laurier and Fifth avenues to motor vehicles daily from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., starting Saturday and running through April 26 “to enable physical distancing for residents who live in the dense surrounding areas.”


The Bank Street Bridge had vehicle lanes reduced on Friday to allow for more room for physical-distancing by pedestrians on the sidewalks.

Wayne Cuddington /

Postmedia

The NCC asked that only local residents living nearby access the Queen Elizabeth Driveway during the pilot and that “members of the public should not seek to drive there as a destination.”

Canadian Heritage also announced Friday that this year’s Canada Day festivities in Ottawa, which typically fills the downtown core and Parliament Hill grounds with tens of thousands of revellers, would be held online.

“We are working with Canadian artists and artisans to put together a virtual program,” the department said, promising more details soon.

With files from Taylor Blewett and Joanne Laucius

bdeachman@postmedia.com

City of Ottawa, as of 4 p.m. Thursday

728: Number of confirmed cases

50: Number of new cases since Wednesday

21: Total number of deaths

7: Number of new deaths — two on Monday, one on Tuesday and four on Wednesday

16: Number of outbreaks in institutions, including hospitals, LTC and retirement homes

106: Number of confirmed cases among first responders

37: Number of patients in hospital

13: Number in intensive care

304: Number of cases resolved

Ontario, as of Thursday

9,525: Number of confirmed cases

564: Number of new cases since Wednesday

478: Total number of deaths

55: Number of new deaths since Wednesday

106: Approximate number of outbreaks in LTC homes

4;556: Number of cases resolved

Generally, statistics for official diagnoses should be viewed with caution. Testing does not track down all cases in a community because the mild symptoms most people have aren’t distinguishable from common colds, and because public health can’t test large numbers of people.

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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.

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Older patients, non-English speakers more likely to be harmed in hospital: report

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Patients who are older, don’t speak English, and don’t have a high school education are more likely to experience harm during a hospital stay in Canada, according to new research.

The Canadian Institute for Health Information measured preventableharmful events from 2023 to 2024, such as bed sores and medication errors,experienced by patients who received acute care in hospital.

The research published Thursday shows patients who don’t speak English or French are 30 per cent more likely to experience harm. Patients without a high school education are 20 per cent more likely to endure harm compared to those with higher education levels.

The report also found that patients 85 and older are five times more likely to experience harm during a hospital stay compared to those under 20.

“The goal of this report is to get folks thinking about equity as being a key dimension of the patient safety effort within a hospital,” says Dana Riley, an author of the report and a program lead on CIHI’s population health team.

When a health-care provider and a patient don’t speak the same language, that can result in the administration of a wrong test or procedure, research shows. Similarly, Riley says a lower level of education is associated with a lower level of health literacy, which can result in increased vulnerability to communication errors.

“It’s fairly costly to the patient and it’s costly to the system,” says Riley, noting the average hospital stay for a patient who experiences harm is four times more expensive than the cost of a hospital stay without a harmful event – $42,558 compared to $9,072.

“I think there are a variety of different reasons why we might start to think about patient safety, think about equity, as key interconnected dimensions of health-care quality,” says Riley.

The analysis doesn’t include data on racialized patients because Riley says pan-Canadian data was not available for their research. Data from Quebec and some mental health patients was also excluded due to differences in data collection.

Efforts to reduce patient injuries at one Ontario hospital network appears to have resulted in less harm. Patient falls at Mackenzie Health causing injury are down 40 per cent, pressure injuries have decreased 51 per cent, and central line-associated bloodstream infections, such as IV therapy, have been reduced 34 per cent.

The hospital created a “zero harm” plan in 2019 to reduce errors after a hospital survey revealed low safety scores. They integrated principles used in aviation and nuclear industries, which prioritize safety in complex high-risk environments.

“The premise is first driven by a cultural shift where people feel comfortable actually calling out these events,” says Mackenzie Health President and Chief Executive Officer Altaf Stationwala.

They introduced harm reduction training and daily meetings to discuss risks in the hospital. Mackenzie partnered with virtual interpreters that speak 240 languages and understand medical jargon. Geriatric care nurses serve the nearly 70 per cent of patients over the age of 75, and staff are encouraged to communicate as frequently as possible, and in plain language, says Stationwala.

“What we do in health care is we take control away from patients and families, and what we know is we need to empower patients and families and that ultimately results in better health care.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.

Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.

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