The Public Health Agency of Canada struggled to keep track of whether travellers ordered to stay in quarantine hotels actually did so, according to a new report from the auditor general.
Auditor General Karen Hogan tabled four reports this afternoon in the House of Commons looking at COVID-19 measures. One of the reports examines enforcement of quarantine hotel stays and testing requirements from July 1, 2020 to the end of June 2021.
At the start of the year — in addition to the already required 14-day quarantine period — the government introduced new rules for incoming travellers meant to limit the spread of COVID-19 and its variants.
Travellers crossing by both land and air were required to show a negative COVID-19 test no more than 72 hours before their scheduled flights to Canada.
Air and land travellers were also required to undergo both on-arrival and post-arrival COVID-19 tests. In addition, incoming air travellers were required to pre-book and pre-pay for a three-day stay at a government-authorized hotel, where they were to remain in quarantine while waiting for their on-arrival test results.
Hogan’s audit found that the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) didn’t have an automated system to track whether travellers ordered to quarantine at authorized hotels actually did so.
It discovered PHAC only had records to verify hotel stays for about a quarter of air travellers for the February to June 2021 period.
“Because the agency did not have records of stay for 75 per cent of travellers who flew into Canada, it did not know whether those who were required to quarantine at government authorized hotels had complied,” said Hogan.
“In addition, the agency did not reliably track whether air travellers who had been notified of positive COVID-19 tests had stayed at a government-authorized hotel as required.”
WATCH | AG says Public Health Agency of Canada failed to keep tabs on most quarantine hotel stays:
Public health agency didn’t track most quarantine hotel stays, auditor general says
2 hours ago
Duration 2:00
A new auditor general’s report says the Public Health Agency of Canada failed to keep track of most travellers assigned to quarantine hotels earlier this year. It also found one-third of COVID-19 test results were missing or not matched to a returning traveller. 2:00
Although they’re not required to do so, some hotels told PHAC by email that 326 people who had booked quarantine stays never checked in. About 74 per cent of these travellers were then referred to law enforcement as a priority for follow-up action — but no tickets had been issued at the time the audit was tabled.
PHAC agreed with the audit’s recommendation that it improve its tracking and said in response that it initiated an assessment of its information technology systems and data requirements for border measures in November.
New omicron measures criticized
The government dropped the hotel quarantine requirement this summer but has reinstated some measures as part of its attempt to contain the emerging omicron variant.
Foreign travellers from 10 nations — all of them in Africa — are barred from entering Canada, while Canadian citizens and permanent residents returning from affected countries must quarantine. Air travellers from all countries except the United States are also required to take COVID-19 tests when arriving in Canada.
Auditor General Karen Hogan tabled four reports today. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)
These policy measures have attracted criticism — both over the quality of the hotel stays and over the way these measures single out African countries when the omicron variant has been detected in other countries as well.
“That is not only discriminatory, it is ridiculous,” said Dr. Christian Happi, a professor of molecular biology and genomics, during a briefing with the World Health Organization’s regional office in Africa Thursday morning.
Missing test results
Hogan’s audit also found that about 30 per cent of COVID-19 test results were either missing or could not be matched to incoming travellers. In total, 262,244 test were mislaid and 137,686 could not be matched to travellers between February to June 2021.
“We also found that, although the Public Health Agency of Canada successfully contacted most travellers with positive COVID-19 tests, it had not contacted 14 per cent of the travellers who tested positive for COVID-19 to assess their isolation plans,” says the audit.
An earlier audit from Hogan’s office found that public health officers struggled to keep tabs on returning travellers in the early days of the pandemic. That March 2021 audit found PHAC was not sure if two thirds of the people who were supposed to be under home quarantine were actually following the rule.
‘This is not a success story’
Thursday’s report concluded that while the agency eventually improved its verification of traveller compliance, significant gaps remained — and from January to June 2021 it still couldn’t verify quarantine compliance for 37 per cent of travellers.
The auditor attributed the improvement in PHAC’s verification efforts to a shift from paperwork to collecting contact information electronically.
“Though the Public Health Agency of Canada improved its results, this is not a success story,” said Hogan.
“The agency’s inability to confirm whether more than a third travellers complied with quarantine orders remains a significant problem.”
Incoming air travellers from all countries except the United States are required to take COVID-19 tests when arriving in Canada. (Marta Lavandier/The Associated Press)
Conservative health critic Luc Berthold said the report shows that the government didn’t learn from Hogan’s first report
“The findings in the Auditor General’s report reveal a pattern of incompetence, with severe gaps in the application of policies,” he said in a written statement.
“The abhorrent standards in government-run quarantine facilities are no surprise – this is now the second Auditor General report documenting the governments’ total incompetency in operating these facilities.”
Don Davies and Taylor Bachrach, respectively the federal NDP’s critics for health and transport, spoke to reporters Thursday afternoon. Davies called some of the report’s findings “extremely disturbing.”
“The report that has come out from the auditor general now shows a shocking gross negligence by the Public Health Agency and, by extension, this government in failing to enforce those border control measures,” Davies said.
Hogan did say that, since the last audit, PHAC had increased the number of referrals to law enforcement related to suspected cases of non-compliance. The agency did not know the outcome of 59 per cent of those priority referrals, the audit said.
“Ticketing of travellers for non-compliance was dependent on the enforcement regime in each province and territory, and in some jurisdictions, no tickets were issued,” said the report.
Federal Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos spoke in front of reporters Thursday afternoon. He sat next to Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough, Trade Minister Mary Ng and MP Francis Drouin, parliamentary secretary to the minister of agriculture and agri-food — all of whom spoke in response to the four reports released by the auditor general.
“The government’s response has been far from perfect. We acknowledge this and we are making no excuses for it. We can and we must do better,” Duclos said.
Since the implementation of border measures, Duclos said, seven million compliance-verification calls were made, as well as 500,000 visits to returning travellers to confirm they were quarantining at home.
More than 15,000 individuals stayed at designated-quarantine facilities managed by the federal government, 7,000 enforcement actions were taken and 2.8 million tests were administered post-arrival to limit the importation and spread of COVID-19 and its variants of concern, he said.
While Horgan’s report only covered the pandemic period up to June 2021, Duclos said PHAC has taken steps to address the shortcomings it identified.
WATCH | Health minister responds to questions about auditor general’s findings on quarantine hotels:
Auditor general’s report finds Public Health Agency failed to keep tabs on most quarantine hotel stays
10 hours ago
Duration 0:51
Auditor General Karen Hogan says her research on quarantine hotel stays found that the agency had not able to confirm whether ’75 per cent of the individuals actually arrived at the hotel and stayed for those three days.’ 0:51
Still, while the report criticized PHAC’s inability to contact 14 per cent of the travellers who tested positive, Duclos wouldn’t promise that all such travellers would be contacted in the future.
“Whether we will reach 100 per cent … no. We will never reach 100 per cent of people being contacted for any particular reason because such a system doesn’t exist,” he said.
“But a good, improving system is better than no system at all.”
Hogan said that the government also needs to improve how it delivers on its pandemic policies as concerns about omicron mount.
Hogan said that the government needs to improve how it delivers on its pandemic policies as concerns about omicron mount.
“With travel increasing and new variants continuing to emerge, the agency needs to improve the way it manages and enforces border control measures that are meant to limit the introduction of the COVID-19 virus and its variants into Canada,” she said.
The other audits Hogan’s office released today concluded that:
Inspections conducted by Employment and Social Development Canada provided little assurance that the health of temporary foreign workers in Canada’s agricultural sector was being protected during the pandemic.
Although the Regional Relief and Recovery Fund delivered last-resort assistance to thousands of businesses and organizations affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, several weaknesses in program management lessened its efficiency, fairness and transparency.
Emergency programs that were meant to reduce food insecurity and support resilience in Canada’s food processing sector during the COVID-19 pandemic helped mitigate some of the effects of the pandemic on elements of Canada’s food system.
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.
