A protester blows a bicycle horn outside the Knesset in Jerusalem on Thursday, after Israel moved to further tighten its second countrywide lockdown amid soaring coronavirus case numbers. (Maya Alleruzzo/Associated Press)
Public health officials call for tighter restrictions, warn COVID-19 could spiral out of control
Infectious disease experts say Canadian health authorities must tighten restrictions again, or hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 will increase exponentially in the coming weeks. Canada reported 1,248 new cases Wednesday, and Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam has outlined projections that show new cases could climb to 5,000 daily by October if we continue on the current course.
“To date, we’re not moving fast enough to get ahead of this,” Dr. Michael Gardam, an infectious disease physician based at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, told CBC News. “I think we’re being lulled into a false sense of security because of the low numbers of hospitalizations and deaths [relative to earlier in the pandemic]. But they will come in the next six weeks or so.”
He said asking people nicely to tighten their social circles is not going to be enough. Gardam said Canadians grew fatigued with the restrictions imposed on their social circles earlier in the year and won’t be eager to return to them unless pressed. “I think we’re going to have to be a lot more forceful,” he said. Right now, “people are playing fast and loose with bubbles all over the place.”
The actions taken in the next two weeks could change the trajectory of the pandemic in the months to come, said Laura Rosella, an epidemiologist and associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. “There’s a lot of things with this pandemic that we can’t control, but we might be able to control who we interact with, especially socially, and who’s in our bubble,” said Rosella. “I would encourage everyone to rethink what their bubbles are given the new situation.”
Getting a handle on this COVID-19 surge means returning to restrictions implemented earlier in the pandemic, said Dr. Samir Gupta, a clinician-scientist at St. Michael’s Hospital and an assistant professor in the department of medicine at the University of Toronto. Speaking with Heather Hiscox on CBC Morning Live Wednesday, Gupta said Canadians “need to start making similar sacrifices to the ones we made the first time around,” which was successful with flattening the curve in the spring.
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IN BRIEF
Ontario sees 409 new COVID-19 cases, rolls out $1B updated testing and contact-tracing plan
Ontario reported an additional 409 cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, as Premier Doug Ford said his government will invest $1 billion to expand testing and contact-tracing capacity heading into flu season, including some $30 million to “prevent and manage outbreaks” in priority settings such as long-term care facilities, retirement homes and schools.
The province’s network of labs is currently facing a backlog of 53,840 test samples, the most since cases of the infection were first detected in January. During a media briefing, health officials said that publicly funded testing sites are moving away from offering tests to asymptomatic people. Instead, the province will return to a more targeted approach as hospitals, testing sites and labs have reported being overwhelmed by public demand for tests.
“We know that over the summer, when we opened up testing to anybody who wanted it, we did not find cases,” said Dr. Barbara Yaffe, Ontario’s associate chief medical officer of health. “Right now, we need to focus on people who are symptomatic, people who are contacts, people in outbreaks, or in very specific populations where we have designated that testing needs to occur. Your average person out there who is not exposed to a case … should not be going for testing. There’s no value. In fact, what we found is when there’s very little COVID in that group, what we end up with is false positives, which just complicates things even more.”
Testing of asymptomatic people will be limited to pharmacies, an initiative announced by Ford earlier this week. According to Matthew Anderson, president and CEO of Ontario Health, the province hopes to have capacity for up to 50,000 tests per day some time in October.
No one likes wearing a mask — but with COVID-19 cases rising, you should put it on more often than you think
Experts are warning that at this point in the pandemic, when the benefits of mask-wearing are growing clear and COVID-19 cases are rising rapidly, Canadians should be donning their masks as much as possible.
“Keep wearing your mask, as much as you can, especially with people you don’t live with,” Toronto’s medical officer of health, Dr. Eileen de Villa, stressed on Monday. Multiple experts who spoke to CBC News this week say that means keeping a mask on in a variety of settings, even if local bylaws don’t mandate it.
Dr. Zain Chagla, an associate professor of medicine at McMaster University and an infectious disease consultant at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton, said masks are helpful when staying a couple of metres apart is challenging — “even if you’re on the patio, until you have to eat and drink, and then putting it back on afterwards,” he said. “We just have to kind of get people to make it a reflex.”
Edmonton-based health policy expert Timothy Caulfield agreed that people should strive to wear a mask around anyone from outside their own household. “If it’s an indoor environment and you can’t get that good two-metre space all the time, think about wearing a mask — even if it’s family members,” said Caulfield, Canada Research Chair in health law and policy and research director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta.
Liberals boost some COVID-19 benefits in new bill
The federal government tabled legislation Thursday to provide what it’s calling a “safe bridge” for Canadians who are still experiencing lost income due to COVID-19. The proposed new suite of measures aims to transition people from the Canada emergency response benefit (CERB) to an employment insurance program with expanded eligibility or to one of three new recovery benefits. Bill C-2 also provides for a 10-day sick leave benefit — something the NDP had demanded.
During a news conference in Ottawa, Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough said the CERB was introduced quickly at a time when most of the economy was at a standstill. As the country moves into economic recovery mode, the government is better placed to deliver financial support in a more sophisticated way, she said. “I think we’ve created, in Bill C-2, a much more elegant balance between the need to not disincentivize work but also support people who, regardless of effort, still aren’t working or have significantly reduced hours,” she said.
Qualtrough said the past few months have exposed gaps in the EI system, which is why the government wants to modernize it to better reflect Canada’s current labour market. Measures in the legislation offer greater flexibility on the work hours required for the EI benefit, making it easier for people to qualify for a one-year period.
In Quebec, the first confirmed case of COVID-19 was traced back to as early as Feb. 25, according to the study, but it and other early cases were well contained and did not lead to sustained transmission. “It was a trickle at first,” said Jesse Shapiro, an associate professor in the department for human genetics and head of genome sciences at McGill, noting that it was easier to manage the few cases of COVID-19 in the province at that time.
That trickle turned into a rush of new arrivals after the province’s early spring break, with hundreds of travellers returning to Quebec after travelling abroad. The study, which has not been peer reviewed, suggests what many already suspected: the early break, which began Feb. 29, was a key factor in the spread of the virus before the lockdown in mid-March.
According to the study, nearly one-third of the infections in Quebec came through Europe, with 12 per cent coming from France. Just under 31 per cent of the virus samples studied came from the Caribbean and Latin America, and around 24 per cent came from the United States. Few transmissions appeared to come from Asia.
AND FINALLY…
Disney postpones Black Widow, West Side Story
From left, president of Marvel Studios Kevin Feige, Scarlett Johansson, David Harbour, Florence Pugh, O-T Fagbenle, director Cate Shortland and Rachel Weisz of Marvel Studios’ Black Widow stand on stage at the San Diego Comic-Con last year in San Diego, Calif. (Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney)
The Walt Disney Co. has further postponed its next mega-movies from Marvel, including Black Widow, while also postponing Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story a full year in the company’s latest recalibration due to the pandemic.
Ten of Disney’s top films shuffled release dates Wednesday, uprooting several of the company’s major fall releases. The Scarlett Johansson Marvel movie Black Widow, last set for Nov. 6, heads now to May 7 of next year. Instead of opening next month, Kenneth Branagh’s murder mystery Death on the Nile moves to Dec. 18. That was the date set for West Side Story, but Spielberg’s musical will instead debut in December 2021.
Disney didn’t entirely abandon the season. The Pixar release Soul remains on the calendar for late November. But the delays of Disney’s upcoming blockbusters reinforce the growing exodus from 2020 among the movies that hadn’t already uprooted to next year.
Netflix on Thursday reported that its subscriber growth slowed dramatically during the summer, a sign the huge gains from the video-streaming service’s crackdown on freeloading viewers is tapering off.
The 5.1 million subscribers that Netflix added during the July-September period represented a 42% decline from the total gained during the same time last year. Even so, the company’s revenue and profit rose at a faster pace than analysts had projected, according to FactSet Research.
Netflix ended September with 282.7 million worldwide subscribers — far more than any other streaming service.
The Los Gatos, California, company earned $2.36 billion, or $5.40 per share, a 41% increase from the same time last year. Revenue climbed 15% from a year ago to $9.82 billion. Netflix management predicted the company’s revenue will rise at the same 15% year-over-year pace during the October-December period, slightly than better than analysts have been expecting.
The strong financial performance in the past quarter coupled with the upbeat forecast eclipsed any worries about slowing subscriber growth. Netflix’s stock price surged nearly 4% in extended trading after the numbers came out, building upon a more than 40% increase in the company’s shares so far this year.
The past quarter’s subscriber gains were the lowest posted in any three-month period since the beginning of last year. That drop-off indicates Netflix is shifting to a new phase after reaping the benefits from a ban on the once-rampant practice of sharing account passwords that enabled an estimated 100 million people watch its popular service without paying for it.
The crackdown, triggered by a rare loss of subscribers coming out of the pandemic in 2022, helped Netflix add 57 million subscribers from June 2022 through this June — an average of more than 7 million per quarter, while many of its industry rivals have been struggling as households curbed their discretionary spending.
Netflix’s gains also were propelled by a low-priced version of its service that included commercials for the first time in its history. The company still is only getting a small fraction of its revenue from the 2-year-old advertising push, but Netflix is intensifying its focus on that segment of its business to help boost its profits.
In a letter to shareholder, Netflix reiterated previous cautionary notes about its expansion into advertising, though the low-priced option including commercials has become its fastest growing segment.
“We have much more work to do improving our offering for advertisers, which will be a priority over the next few years,” Netflix management wrote in the letter.
As part of its evolution, Netflix has been increasingly supplementing its lineup of scripted TV series and movies with live programming, such as a Labor Day spectacle featuring renowned glutton Joey Chestnut setting a world record for gorging on hot dogs in a showdown with his longtime nemesis Takeru Kobayashi.
Netflix will be trying to attract more viewer during the current quarter with a Nov. 15 fight pitting former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson against Jake Paul, a YouTube sensation turned boxer, and two National Football League games on Christmas Day.
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