Ontario economy reopening details on the way as 1,670 new COVID-19 cases reported - CBC.ca

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Ontario economy reopening details on the way as 1,670 new COVID-19 cases reported – CBC.ca

Published

3 years ago

February 5, 2021

Harry Miller

Premier Doug Ford will announce details of reopening Ontario’s economy next week, the labour minister said Friday as the government debated whether or not to extend the province’s state of emergency.

Monte McNaughton did not provide further specifics, but his comments were made as the province’s current state of emergency is set to expire on Tuesday.

“We’re moving toward reopening the economy and the premier is going to further communicate that next week,” McNaughton said.

Ontario’s Solicitor General’s office said no decisions have been made regarding whether to end or extend the emergency order.

A provincial lockdown was imposed in late December and was followed by the state of emergency and a stay-at-home order that took effect Jan. 14 as COVID-19 rates surged.

While cases have since declined, public health officials have said the spread of more contagious variants of COVID-19 are a concern.

Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. David Williams, has said he would like to see daily cases drop below 1,000 and the number of patients with COVID-19 in hospital intensive care units below 150 before lifting restrictions.

“It is achievable, we can get back there,” Williams said in mid-January.

Another 1,670 cases reported provincially, 45 more deaths

Ontario reported another 1,670 cases of COVID-19 and the deaths of 45 more people with the illness on Friday, as the province’s labs logged a test positivity rate not seen since October.

The new cases include 667 in Toronto, 317 in Peel Region, 125 in York Region and 100 in Halton Region.

The total for Toronto, however, includes 125 previous cases that were missed when the local public health unit migrated its data to Ontario’s centralized COVID-19 tracking system, the Ministry of Health said.

The new cases come as labs completed 62,710 tests for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and reported a provincewide positivity rate of 2.5 per cent — the lowest it has been since Oct. 22, 2020.

The 45 additional deaths push Ontario’s official COVID-19-linked toll to 6,438.

Other public health units that saw double-digit increases in new cases were:

Waterloo Region: 64
Durham Region: 46
Ottawa: 46
Hamilton: 45
Simcoe Muskoka: 43
Niagara Region: 41
Windsor-Essex: 28
Middlesex-London: 26
Brant County: 20
Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph: 19
Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge: 17
Southwestern: 16
Eastern Ontario: 11

(Note: All of the figures used in this story are found on the Ministry of Health’s COVID-19 dashboard or in its Daily Epidemiologic Summary. The number of cases for any region may differ from what is reported by the local public health unit, because local units report figures at different times.)

The seven-day average of new daily cases fell to 1,576, the lowest since late November. It has been in steady decline since its peak at 3,555 on Jan. 11.

Further, the number of confirmed, active cases of COVID-19 in Ontario fell to 15,722, down from a high of more than 30,000 last month.

Speaking yesterday, Williams said generally, many indicators are on a “downward trend” in the province.

“But at the same time, we’re not out of the woods on these issues,” he cautioned.

Of particular worry are the “variants of concern” of the virus currently circulating in Ontario. The province said as of yesterday, it had confirmed 156 cases linked to variants: 155 caused by the variant identified in the United Kingdom and one case of the variant first found in South Africa.

Meanwhile, the province said it administered another 7,694 doses of COVID-19 vaccines yesterday. A total of 362,749 doses have been given out in Ontario so far, and 87,831 people have gotten both shots required for maximum immunization.

York sees unexpected characteristics of variant

Dr. Karim Kurji, medical officer of health in York Region, said Friday morning that his public health unit has found 55 cases caused by the variant identified in the U.K. While more data collection and analysis is needed at the provincial and country-wide levels, Kurji said experts in York have observed some unexpected characteristics of the variant.

WATCH | Dr. Karim Kurji on how COVID variants can cause cases to increase exponentially:

There is obvious community transmission of COVID-19 variants, according to York Region Medical Officer of Health Dr. Karim Kurji, who says the virus needs to be contained as it has the capacity to increase case numbers exponentially. 7:51

“We are finding, for example, between multiple households the incubation period is as short as 12 hours to two days. This is news to us, because most people get [COVID-19] symptoms in about five to seven days,” he told CBC News Network.

Many of the people in York who contracted the variant reported that they’ve been adhering to current public health guidelines, he added.

“What is very clear to us is that we have to keep these variants at a low level while we get folks vaccinated. If we do not, there are going to be issues, unfortunately, with respect to the control of this pandemic,” Kurji said.

Cases of COVID-19 variants have also been detected in at least three public health units in northern Ontario.

The public health unit covering the Sudbury, Ont., region says it has confirmed one case of the variant that emerged in the U.K. Public Health Sudbury and Districts says three other likely variant cases are being investigated.

The North Bay Parry Sound District Health Unit says it’s also confirmed its first variant case with tests underway to determine the exact strain.

And the Porcupine Health Unit has confirmation of a possible variant case linked to a long-term care outbreak in Kapuskasing, Ont.

Toronto investigating 5 new cases with mutations

In Toronto, public health officials announced five new cases involving mutations at two health-care facilities. That includes one case confirmed positive for B.1.1.7, first identified in the U.K. Lab results are still pending for the other four.

The confirmed variant case is at Baycrest Hospital, where Toronto Public Health is investigating four cases in total. Baycrest is facing an outbreak of 16 positive COVID-19 cases among 11 patients and five staff.

The fifth case being investigated is at Elm Grove Living Centre. That facility is facing a smaller outbreak of three residents and eight staff members who have tested positive for COVID-19.

Meanwhile, Statistics Canada reported Friday morning that lockdowns took a considerable toll on the country’s workforce last month. Canada’s economy lost 213,000 jobs in January, about five times more than what economists were expecting, as retail lockdowns forced more businesses to close their doors across the country.

Most of the losses were concentrated in Ontario and Quebec, which lost a combined 251,000 jobs — mostly in retail, accommodation and food services.

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Health

Interior Health delivers nearly 800K immunization doses in 2023

Published

4 hours ago

April 23, 2024

Harry Miller

Interior Health says it delivered nearly 800,000 immunization doses last year — a number almost equal to the region’s population.

The released figure of 784,980 comes during National Immunization Awareness Week, which runs April 22-30.

The health care organization, which serves a large area of around 820,000, says it’s using the occasion to boost vaccine rates even though there may be post-pandemic vaccine fatigue.

“This is a very important initiative because it ensures that communicable diseases stay away from a region,” said Dr. Silvina Mema of Interior Health.

However, not all those doses were for COVID; the tally includes childhood immunizations plus immunizations for adults.

But IHA said immunizations are down from the height of the pandemic, when COVID vaccines were rolled out, though it seems to be on par with previous pre-pandemic years.

Interior Health says it’d like to see the overall immunization rate rise.

“Certainly there are some folks who have decided a vaccine is not for them. And they have their reasons,” said Jonathan Spence, manager of communicable disease prevention and control at Interior Health.

“I think there’s a lot of people who are hesitant, but that’s just simply because they have questions.

“And that’s actually part of what we’re celebrating this week is those public health nurses, those pharmacists, who can answer questions and answer questions with really good information around immunization.”

Mima echoed that sentiment.

“We take immunization very seriously. It’s a science-based program that has saved countless lives across the world and eliminated diseases that were before a threat and now we don’t see them anymore,” she said.

“So immunization is very important.”

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Remnants of bird flu virus found in pasteurized milk, FDA says

Published

5 hours ago

April 23, 2024

Harry Miller

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that samples of pasteurized milk had tested positive for remnants of the bird flu virus that has infected dairy cows.

The agency stressed that the material is inactivated and that the findings “do not represent actual virus that may be a risk to consumers.” Officials added that they’re continuing to study the issue.

“To date, we have seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe,” the FDA said in a statement.

The announcement comes nearly a month after an avian influenza virus that has sickened millions of wild and commercial birds in recent years was detected in dairy cows in at least eight states. The Agriculture Department says 33 herds have been affected to date.

FDA officials didn’t indicate how many samples they tested or where they were obtained. The agency has been evaluating milk during processing and from grocery stores, officials said. Results of additional tests are expected in “the next few days to weeks.”

The PCR lab test the FDA used would have detected viral genetic material even after live virus was killed by pasteurization, or heat treatment, said Lee-Ann Jaykus, an emeritus food microbiologist and virologist at North Carolina State University

“There is no evidence to date that this is infectious virus and the FDA is following up on that,” Jaykus said.

Officials with the FDA and the USDA had previously said milk from affected cattle did not enter the commercial supply. Milk from sick animals is supposed to be diverted and destroyed. Federal regulations require milk that enters interstate commerce to be pasteurized.

Because the detection of the bird flu virus known as Type A H5N1 in dairy cattle is new and the situation is evolving, no studies on the effects of pasteurization on the virus have been completed, FDA officials said. But past research shows that pasteurization is “very likely” to inactivate heat-sensitive viruses like H5N1, the agency added.

Matt Herrick, a spokesman for the International Dairy Foods Association, said that time and temperature regulations for pasteurization ensure that the commercial U.S. milk supply is safe. Remnants of the virus “have zero impact on human health,” he wrote in an email.

Scientists confirmed the H5N1 virus in dairy cows in March after weeks of reports that cows in Texas were suffering from a mysterious malady. The cows were lethargic and saw a dramatic reduction in milk production. Although the H5N1 virus is lethal to commercial poultry, most infected cattle seem to recover within two weeks, experts said.

To date, two people in U.S. have been infected with bird flu. A Texas dairy worker who was in close contact with an infected cow recently developed a mild eye infection and has recovered. In 2022, a prison inmate in a work program caught it while killing infected birds at a Colorado poultry farm. His only symptom was fatigue, and he recovered.

___

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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Health

Canada Falling Short in Adult Vaccination Rates – VOCM

Published

8 hours ago

April 23, 2024

Harry Miller

Canada is about where it should be when it comes to childhood vaccines, but for adult vaccinations it’s a different story.

Dr. Vivien Brown of Immunize Canada says the overall population should have rates of between 80 and 90 per cent for most vaccines, but that is not the case.

She says most children are in that range but not for adult vaccines and ultimately the most at-risk populations are not being reached.

She says the population is under immunized for conditions such as pneumonia, shingles, tetanus, and pertussis.

Brown wants people to talk with their family physician or pharmacist to see if they are up-to-date on vaccines, and to get caught up because many are “killer diseases.”

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