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Schools and child-care centres close in light of COVID-19 on P.E.I. – CBC.ca

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In a media briefing Sunday evening, P.E.I.’s Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Heather Morrison and Minister of Education Brad Trivers announced the closures of child-care centres and schools in response to COVID-19 on P.E.I.

While Island students are on March break beginning Monday, public schools across the Island will be closed for two weeks following March break, Morrison said.

For now, schools are set to re-open on April 6, Morrison said. 

According to a new report, P.E.I. is leading the country when it comes to early childhood education. (Katerina Georgieva/CBC)

Child-care centres

Child-care centres will be closed beginning March 17, until further notice. 

Effective immediately the Mark Arendz Provincial Ski Park at Brookvale and all tourist and all provincial visitor information sites will also be closed. 

“A week ago we may not have anticipated having to make that decision but I think it’s the right decision at this time,” Morrison said.

“These decisions are certainly not made lightly because they impact many people in our community and we’re particularly concerned of course about child care for our essential services like health care workers,” she said.

She said the province will continue to monitor the situation and reassess its action plan as the situation evolves. 

School closures are being implemented by the province to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19. (Renée Sullivan/Submitted)

School closures

Trivers said the province’s intention is to ensure that Island children are able to complete the school year.

Trivers said numbers on the cost of the closure of child-care centres and schools can be expected in the coming days. 

We are continuing to test many Islanders in the last few days, who have … symptoms.— Dr. Heather Morrison, P.E.I.’s Chief Public Health Officer

He said he hopes to soon have federal emergency funding, to help offset the costs which will be incurred. 

On Saturday afternoon, Morrison announced the Island’s first confirmed case of COVID-19 in a Queens County woman recently who returned from travel on a cruise ship. 

The woman is in her 50s and is in self-isolation. Morrison said the woman and her family are doing well. 

Three new recommendations were made in a press briefing on Sunday afternoon, relating to the virus. They focused on long-term care and community care facilities, child-care facilities and essential health-care services. 

“We are continuing to test many Islanders in the last few days, who have … symptoms. We have one case, certainly expecting more,” Morrison said. 

Understanding social distancing and self-isolation 

Morrison emphasized the need for Islanders to understand what social distancing and self-isolation mean. 

She said self-isolation is only recommended for those who have travelled outside of the country after March 8. Those who travelled prior to that date are still being asked to monitor for symptoms. 

She said if people in self-isolation begin experiencing symptoms, those living with them should also self-isolate and monitor their symptoms until test results are confirmed.

“If we make some good decisions now, it might help us in the weeks ahead,” Morrison said. 

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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.

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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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