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These Canadians living abroad didn’t come home when coronavirus started — and still won’t – Global News

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Scrambling home on international flights and paying thousands to find footing on Canadian soil again isn’t an ideal scenario for many expats who choose to live abroad during the coronavirus pandemic.

As some countries saw the spread of the virus weeks before cases were confirmed in Canada and are seemingly further along in flattening the curve, it feels safer to stay put, said Kevin Caners, who has lived in Berlin, Germany for six years. 

Global News spoke to Caners, originally from Brockville, Ont., more than a month ago about whether he planned to come home due to the outbreak.


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At the time, Canada had fewer than 70 cases, while Germany had close to 400. Caners expressed then that he’d hoped the situation would improve in Europe and he didn’t feel compelled to return to Canada. 

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Now, with Canada having more than 20,000 cases and 500 deaths due to COVID-19, Caners is doubling down on his plan to remain in Germany and is unsure whether a planned visit to Ontario in June is possible. 

“I can see why a lot of people would want to go home,” said Caners, 34. “But for me it didn’t really seriously cross my mind, because it sounded very stressful to go back to Canada.

“I didn’t think there’s anything [in Canada] that would make weathering this storm any easier that it would be weathering it here,” he said.

Moving back home would mean moving back in with his parents, having to find a new job and living in quarantine for the first 14 days, he said.

“My life is so set up here…and we are a bit further ahead, it had hit us strongly before it hit Canada,” he said.

“So it felt a bit safer here because things were already in flux, and my whole support system is here…I have a safe place to live. I feel it was safer and more comfortable to stay here.”






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For those who just moved abroad and don’t have a support system or steady employment, coming home to Canada would be more pertinent, he said.

As of April 8, there are more than 370,000 Canadians who have signed up for the Registration of Canadians Abroad service provided by Global Affairs Canada. Signing up doesn’t mean you require services to come back to Canada, they said in an email.

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Kevin Caners is glad he stayed in Germany instead of returning to Canada in March. Photo provided by Kevin Caners.


Provided by Kevin Caners

Currently, the daily total of new coronavirus cases has dropped in Germany from around 7,000 to an average of 4,000 and the country has had lower death tolls than Britain, France, Spain and Italy, according to the New York Times. 

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With Austria looking to ease restrictions, Caners says Germans are starting to see the “light at the end of the tunnel,” and he would rather stay put in the hopes the same will happen in Berlin sooner than Canada.

Seeing that hope start to emerge in parts of Europe can be a cautious indication to Canadians that measures can have an impact and improve the scenario, he said.

“Canada will also get through it, it’s just a question of where and when things can go back to what we considered normal,” he said.

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‘Allowed to start going out’ soon in Austria 

The possibility of returning to some semblance of normalcy is one reason Leora Courtney-Wolfman is remaining in Vienna, Austria, where she has lived for the past seven years.

Global News also spoke to Courtney-Wolfman, 35, last month when Vienna was facing lock downs Canada hadn’t experienced yet. 

Austrian officials announced this week that restrictions would begin to loosen in the country, including shops and stores being allowed to re-open in the coming weeks.

A national lockdown was imposed in Austria on March 16, earlier than some other European counterparts. 


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“I feel even better about staying in Austria compared to Canada, because I think from what I’ve seen the country has been quite a leader as far as how to contain things, and how to deal with things overall and just controlling the spread,” said Courtney-Wolfman, who works as a demographic researcher. 

Measures to keep everyone at home appear to be stricter in Austria, allowing her some comfort that the country’s on the right track, she said.

In Vienna she also has job security, which she doesn’t want to abandon to return to Canada, she said. More than a million are now unemployed across the country, Statistics Canada announced on April 9.

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On March 21, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the launch of a loan initiative to help Canadians abroad return home as flights became more scarce and increased in costs. 

Wrangling a flight and risking an airport trip, along with a 14-day quarantine upon return, also didn’t seem ideal, said Courtney-Wolfman. 

“Trying to get a flight or paying for it, even with the loans, it seems incredible stressful,” she said. 

Living in Vienna has allowed her to be in “probably one of the best, least stressful, more certain positions, she said. That would change if she had any more vulnerable family members who may need care in Canada, which would be a good reason to return home, she said. 

After being under a long period of lockdown, she says that while it’s tough to stay home for two months, following the rules can lead to tentative success, she said.

“My suggestion is if you can stay home, stay home, which is easier said than done,” she said. “But we’re going to be allowed to start going out and doing stuff.”

Staying to help on the frontlines

Canadian Alexis Rancier decided to stay in the United Kingdom as the country saw their cases spike to now more than 65,000 along with over 7,000 deaths. 

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But her reasons for remaining aren’t because the country is ahead of the curve when it comes to tackling the virus. She feels a duty to stick around due to her role as an occupational therapist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. 


Alexis Rancier is staying in the U.K. to work in a hospital.

“I am one of the essential workers on the front line,” she said. “I have to discharge a whole bunch of people to make sure that we have enough beds for people who actually have COVID-19…so I decided to stay.”

In mid-March, U.K. officials faced criticism for allowing restaurants, schools and public spaces to remain open as cases were steadily increasing. 

Now cases have exploded and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson remains in hospital after being diagnosed with COVID-19. 


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Rancier says she loves England, but misses her family. She felt a duty to stay at the hospital and help where she can as the country continues to battle the impact of the virus, she explained.

If she wasn’t an essential worker, she would have come home to Canada, she said.

Looking at home from across the pond, she said Canada is tackling the virus more efficiently than the U.K.

“Everyone went on lockdown sooner than the U.K. did, which I think made a big impact…you guys are handling it way better over there,” she said. 

Many in England are flouting social distancing rules and Canadians seem to be listening to officials a little better, she said.

Knowing she can come back to Canada any time has been comforting and currently she feels safe at the hospital she works at, she added.

“Going home can be an option if I do absolutely feel that I’m not coping,” she said.

— With files from Katherine Aylesworth

Questions about COVID-19? Here are some things you need to know:

Health officials caution against all international travel. Returning travellers are legally obligated to self-isolate for 14 days, beginning March 26, in case they develop symptoms and to prevent spreading the virus to others. Some provinces and territories have also implemented additional recommendations or enforcement measures to ensure those returning to the area self-isolate.

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Symptoms can include fever, cough and difficulty breathing — very similar to a cold or flu. Some people can develop a more severe illness. People most at risk of this include older adults and people with severe chronic medical conditions like heart, lung or kidney disease. If you develop symptoms, contact public health authorities.

To prevent the virus from spreading, experts recommend frequent handwashing and coughing into your sleeve. They also recommend minimizing contact with others, staying home as much as possible and maintaining a distance of two metres from other people if you go out.

For full COVID-19 coverage from Global News, click here.

© 2020 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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STD epidemic slows as new syphilis and gonorrhea cases fall in US

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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.

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World’s largest active volcano Mauna Loa showed telltale warning signs before erupting in 2022

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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.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Waymo’s robotaxis now open to anyone who wants a driverless ride in Los Angeles

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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.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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