Today’s coronavirus news: Manitoba to reveal new set of COVID-19 rules as vaccinations continue to rise; China orders mass coronavirus testing for Wuhan - Toronto Star | Canada News Media
Today’s coronavirus news: Manitoba to reveal new set of COVID-19 rules as vaccinations continue to rise; China orders mass coronavirus testing for Wuhan – Toronto Star
The latest coronavirus news from Canada and around the world Tuesday. This file will be updated throughout the day. Web links to longer stories if available.
8 a.m. The Greek Olympic team says the outbreak of COVID-19 cases among its artistic swimmers has ruled them out of competing at the Tokyo Games.
Three new cases were reported Tuesday and the entire artistic swimming squad was asked to leave the Olympic Village. Only one case had been previously confirmed.
The Greek team says they are all staying at a quarantine hotel. Greece was due to compete in the duet and team events.
7:40 a.m. The quickly approaching fall semester has America’s colleges under pressure to decide how far they should go to guard their campuses against COVID-19 while navigating legal and political questions and rising infection rates.
Hundreds of colleges nationwide have told students in recent months they must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 before classes begin.
California State University, the country’s largest four-year public university system, joined the list last week, along with Michigan State University and the University of Michigan. Their announcements cited concerns about the highly contagious delta variant and came as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued updated mask guidelines based on new research regarding its spread.
CSU Chancellor Joseph I. Castro called case surges linked to the variant an “alarming new factor that we must consider as we look to maintain the health and well-being of students, employees and visitors.”
Yet many more colleges have held off on vaccine mandates in a reflection of the limits school leaders face in adopting safety requirements for in-person classes.
In many Republican-led states, governments have banned vaccine mandates, or school leaders face political pressure to limit their anti-virus actions even among students who live in packed residence halls. Opponents say the requirements tread on personal freedoms.
Some campuses have sidestepped pushback by instead offering enticements, such as prize drawings for free tuition and computers, as they seek to boost student vaccination rates to 80 per cent or higher.
And a few have gone against the grain of their GOP-led states, such as Nova Southeastern in Florida requiring employees to get the shots and Nebraska Wesleyan mandating vaccinations for its 2,000 students.
Private colleges like these have more legal leeway regarding coronavirus rules, experts say. Prominent private universities mandating student vaccinations include Harvard, Yale, Notre Dame, Northwestern, Duke and Stanford.
6:40 a.m. Barack Obama is turning 60 on Wednesday and he’s marking the milestone with a celebration.
The Obamas are hosting an outdoor party in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to celebrate the former president’s birthday with friends, family and former staff members, a person familiar with the situation but not authorized to speak publicly told USA TODAY. In order to promote safety, guests are required to adhere to all Centers for Disease Control and Prevention public health protocols, including a testing regimen managed by a COVID-19 coordinator.
Concerns about COVID-19 transmission reignited after the delta coronavirus variant caused a sharp spike in cases around the country in recent weeks. For the first time in more than three months, cases in the U.S. average more than 60,000 per day, according to USA TODAY analysis of Johns Hopkins University data.
The Obamas have been strong advocates for the vaccine, emphasizing “the need and the urgency of our communities getting vaccinated” in a video with Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley in April and getting vaccinated themselves one month earlier.
6:25 a.m. Tokyo is experiencing a record surge in COVID-19 cases during the Olympic Games as the more infectious Delta variant rips through Japan, though contagion among those linked to the event appears to be relatively contained so far.
To date, organizers have announced 294 positive cases among people connected to the Olympics, including 25 athletes out of the more than 11,000 who are expected to participate. Of over 400,000 tests conducted so far on athletes and stakeholders, the positivity rate has been only 0.02 per cent, organizers said on Tuesday.
“There is a separation between the athletes and the various stakeholders, and the general population,” Mark Adams, International Olympic Committee spokesperson, told reporters Monday. “You can’t reduce the risk to zero, but we have with the playbooks pretty well covered the ability to reduce that risk as far as we can.”
The so-called playbooks set out COVID-prevention measures and rules for each Olympics participant including athletes, officials and media.
Breaking down the category of people with positive test results, the largest numbers are among Tokyo 2020 contractors — third-party personnel who are contracted to the games to provide various services — and games-concerned people, who include those affiliated with the IOC, National Olympic Committees and Olympic Broadcasting Services. There have been a cumulative 153 and 89 cases in those categories, respectively.
While athletes in the Olympic Village are required to test daily, requirements are less strict for volunteers who have less contact with athletes. The rules are also harsher for those flying in from overseas, compared to Japanese residents.
5:55 a.m. The United States on Monday finally reached President Joe Biden’s goal of having 70 per cent of eligible adults at least partly vaccinated.
The milestone came a month later than Biden had hoped as the country faced the rapid spread of the highly contagious Delta variant.
There was no celebration at the White House. The announcement was made on Twitter by Cyrus Shahpar, the COVID-19 data director for the Biden administration. “Let’s continue working to get more eligible vaccinated!” Shahpar wrote.
The White House had hoped to announce the 70 per cent vaccination bench mark four weeks ago. Biden initially used Independence Day to declare a victory of sorts over the pandemic and some kind of return to normal life.
But that goal evaporated in recent weeks as the Delta variant spread rapidly, putting pressure on hospitals in regions with low vaccination rates, including many politically conservative areas in the south. Southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, for instance, have been hard hit, swamping hospitals.
In recent weeks, there has been an uptick in the vaccination rate in some states where cases have crested. Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana and Florida have seen steady increases.
5:45 a.m. Florida leads the U.S. in another alarming coronavirus statistic: kids hospitalized with COVID-19.
Florida had 32 pediatric COVID-19 hospitalizations per day between July 24 and 30, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Adjusted for population, that’s 0.76 kids hospitalized per 100,000 residents, the highest rate in the country.
The Florida Department of Health reported 10,785 new COVID-19 infections among children under 12 between July 23 and 29. That’s an average of 1,540 new cases per day.
The surge is worse for children who are eligible for the vaccine — 11,048 new cases among those ages 12 to 19 in the same week.
Last Friday’s state data shows seven deaths among children under 16 since the start of the pandemic in March 2020. Florida stopped reporting COVID-19 deaths by age group to the CDC on July 17.
Dr. Claudia Espinosa, pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of South Florida, said that she is deeply concerned about cases spiking when kids return to school this month. Hundreds of thousands of kids across the state will soon pack themselves into school buses, classrooms and cafeterias.
“I’m terrified of what’s going to happen,” she said.
Pediatric hospitalizations are the latest sign of the resurgent pandemic’s hold on Florida. Last week, the state accounted for nearly one out of every four new infections and hospitalizations in the nation, according to the CDC. State data shows Florida averaged more than 15,780 infections a day over the most recent seven-day period.
Tampa Bay pediatric hospitals are seeing those higher admissions themselves. Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg diagnosed 113 COVID-19 cases in the first three and a half weeks of July, while the hospital only had 11 infections in the entire month of June, said Dr. Joseph Perno, the hospital’s vice president of medical affairs.
Every week in July set a new weekly record for the most cases the hospital has seen during the pandemic, Perno said.
The age range of infected patients is evenly spread between young children and teenagers. And the vast majority of them are unvaccinated, said Dr. Allison Messina, the hospital’s chairman of the Division of Infectious Disease. Children 11 and under cannot yet get the vaccine.
Pediatric COVID-19 patients in BayCare’s 15 Florida hospitals doubled in July compared to June, after two months of declining case numbers, said hospital system spokesperson Lisa Razler.
The vast majority of infected pediatric patients are hospitalized at St. Joseph’s Children’s Hospital in Tampa, Razler said, one of the six BayCare facilities that paused elective surgeries requiring overnight stays to make more beds available for COVID-19 patients.
While infected children are at less risk of serious illness then adults, Messina said they can still develop serious long-term complications, Messina said.
Multisystem inflammatory syndrome is an autoimmune disease that targets school-aged children and can occur two to six weeks after a coronavirus infection. Symptoms include fever, rashes, red eye, and diarrhea and vomiting. If left untreated, Messina said, the illness can be fatal or cause permanent heart damage.
5:33 a.m. Chinese authorities have announced mass coronavirus testing in Wuhan as an unusually wide series of COVID-19 outbreaks reached the city where the disease was first detected in late 2019.
The provincial capital of 11 million people in central China is the latest city to undergo city-wide testing. Three cases were confirmed in Wuhan on Monday, its first non-imported cases in more than a year.
China has largely curbed COVID-19 at home after the initial outbreak that devastated Wuhan and spread globally. Since then, authorities have tamped down and controlled the disease whenever it pops up with quick lockdowns and mass testing.
The current outbreaks are still in the hundreds of cases in total, but have spread much more widely than previous ones. Many of the cases have been identified as the highly contagious delta variant.
The National Health Commission said Tuesday that 90 new cases had been confirmed the previous day.
5 a.m. Ontario’s back-to-school plan will be front and centre this week as the province announces what protocols will be in place so boards can get ready to welcome kids back to in-person learning in just five weeks.
With the government set to announce details as early as Tuesday, questions remain as to what the school year will look like, if the province has taken the advice of pediatric experts — and what has taken so long for the plan to be released.
While most of Ontario’s two million students are set to resume classes in person after Labour Day, some schools, on a modified calendar such as Peel’s Roberta Bondar elementary and York’s Bill Crothers secondary, are returning this week.
Tuesday 4 a.m. The Manitoba government is to announce changes Tuesday to its COVID-19 restrictions.
Premier Brian Pallister and the province’s chief public health officer are scheduled to hold a news conference on the updated orders.
Manitoba is running ahead of its vaccination targets, with roughly 80 per cent of people ages 12 and up having at least one dose and more than 70 per cent having two.
The current rules include a 50 per cent capacity limit at stores, museums, restaurants and gyms.
Casinos, bingo halls, movie theatres and some other facilities are open only to people who are fully vaccinated.
Household visits are also capped at five people in addition to residents of a home.
Monday 7 p.m. U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina tweeted Monday he has tested positive for coronavirus, months after he was vaccinated.
The Republican senator said he started having flu-like symptoms Saturday night and went to the doctor Monday to be tested.
Graham described his symptoms as “mild,” and said his symptoms feel like he has a sinus infection.
He tweeted he will quarantine for the next 10 days, and, despite his diagnosis, is glad he was vaccinated.
“I was just informed by the House physician I have tested positive for #COVID19 even after being vaccinated. I started having flu-like symptoms Saturday night and went to the doctor this morning,” Graham tweeted. “I feel like I have a sinus infection and at present time I have mild symptoms. I will be quarantining for ten days. I am very glad I was vaccinated because without vaccination I am certain I would not feel as well as I do now. My symptoms would be far worse.”
Graham’s diagnosis is among the rising breakthrough cases reported across the country where vaccinated people are testing positive for the virus due to the rise in the delta variant.
South Carolina has also has reported a spike in cases during the past few weeks, seeing its most cases since February.
Monday 6:30 p.m. The positivity rate for COVID-19 testing in Quebec reached 1.4 per cent on Sunday — the highest it’s been since late May.
New COVID-19 infections are also on the rise, according to the Health Department. Officials reported 154 new cases of COVID-19 Monday and 347 new infections identified on Friday and Saturday. Quebec has reported an average of 139 new cases a day over the past seven days, up from an average of 57 a week prior.
Dr. Donald Vinh, an infectious disease specialist at the McGill University Health Centre, says the trends are concerning. The rising positivity rate in the province “means that there is still ongoing community transmission,” he said in an interview Monday.
He is also concerned because Quebec’s rate on Sunday reflected fewer overall tests compared with late May. On May 31, Quebec recorded a test positivity rate of 1.5 per cent based on 15,783 tests. On Sunday, Quebec analyzed 11,202 tests.
The big question, Vinh said, is whether the jump in the positivity rate is a sign Quebecers should expect cases to rise even more in late August and September, when classes at schools, junior colleges and universities resume. “If it’s already increased when we are in the ‘safe’ outdoors, what’s going to happen when we’re in the indoors? That’s where the concern is,” he said.
Despite the rise in cases, deaths and hospitalizations linked to the novel coronavirus haven’t followed suit.
The Health Department, which no longer provides COVID-19 updates on weekends, said no deaths attributed to the novel coronavirus have been reported in the province since Thursday. It said the number of those hospitalized increased by one since its last report, to 61, and 17 people were in intensive care — unchanged since Friday’s update.
Health officials said 38,247 doses of COVID-19 vaccine were administered Sunday and Quebec’s public health institute reported that 84.6 per cent of residents 12 and up have received at least one dose of vaccine while 68 per cent are adequately vaccinated.
Dr. André Veillette, an immunologist at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute and member of the federal government’s COVID-19 vaccine task force, said it’s likely the number of active COVID-19 cases in the province is higher than testing data suggests.
“I think we should be worried, but I think that what we should be even more worried about is that we’re not worried enough,” Veillette said. “We’ve all become a little bit complacent.”
Veillette said the rise in cases in the province is likely the result of the more contagious Delta variant of the virus.
Data from Quebec’s public health institute on Monday, however, indicates the percentage of positive COVID-19 cases involving variants dropped the week ending July 24, compared with the prior week. But Judith Fafard, a medical microbiologist at the Institut national de santé publique du Québec, said that data is incomplete.
It takes time, she explained, for results to be gathered and processed from the province’s decentralized laboratory network. The most reliable data on variants comes from the week ending July 17, which showed a rise in the percentage of cases involving the Delta variant from the prior week.
The percentage of cases involving the Alpha variant — which accounted for more than 80 per cent of all COVID-19 cases in Quebec in mid-May — has also been dropping since the last week of that month, she said.
“It would be surprising if we were any different from England, the other provinces and the United States, so what’s replacing Alpha is probably the Delta variant,” she said.
“We know that the Delta variant is in Quebec and that it is growing.”
TORONTO – Health Canada has authorized Moderna’s updated COVID-19 vaccine that protects against currently circulating variants of the virus.
The mRNA vaccine, called Spikevax, has been reformulated to target the KP.2 subvariant of Omicron.
It will replace the previous version of the vaccine that was released a year ago, which targeted the XBB.1.5 subvariant of Omicron.
Health Canada recently asked provinces and territories to get rid of their older COVID-19 vaccines to ensure the most current vaccine will be used during this fall’s respiratory virus season.
Health Canada is also reviewing two other updated COVID-19 vaccines but has not yet authorized them.
They are Pfizer’s Comirnaty, which is also an mRNA vaccine, as well as Novavax’s protein-based vaccine.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17, 2024.
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
TORONTO – Sanniah Jabeen holds a sonogram of the unborn baby she lost after contracting listeria last December. Beneath, it says “love at first sight.”
Jabeen says she believes she and her baby were poisoned by a listeria outbreak linked to some plant-based milks and wants answers. An investigation continues into the recall declared July 8 of several Silk and Great Value plant-based beverages.
“I don’t even have the words. I’m still processing that,” Jabeen says of her loss. She was 18 weeks pregnant when she went into preterm labour.
The first infection linked to the recall was traced back to August 2023. One year later on Aug. 12, 2024, the Public Health Agency of Canada said three people had died and 20 were infected.
The number of cases is likely much higher, says Lawrence Goodridge, Canada Research Chair in foodborne pathogen dynamics at the University of Guelph: “For every person known, generally speaking, there’s typically 20 to 25 or maybe 30 people that are unknown.”
The case count has remained unchanged over the last month, but the Public Health Agency of Canada says it won’t declare the outbreak over until early October because of listeria’s 70-day incubation period and the reporting delays that accompany it.
Danone Canada’s head of communications said in an email Wednesday that the company is still investigating the “root cause” of the outbreak, which has been linked to a production line at a Pickering, Ont., packaging facility.
Pregnant people, adults over 60, and those with weakened immune systems are most at risk of becoming sick with severe listeriosis. If the infection spreads to an unborn baby, Health Canada says it can cause miscarriage, stillbirth, premature birth or life-threatening illness in a newborn.
The Canadian Press spoke to 10 people, from the parents of a toddler to an 89-year-old senior, who say they became sick with listeria after drinking from cartons of plant-based milk stamped with the recalled product code. Here’s a look at some of their experiences.
Sanniah Jabeen, 32, Toronto
Jabeen says she regularly drank Silk oat and almond milk in smoothies while pregnant, and began vomiting seven times a day and shivering at night in December 2023. She had “the worst headache of (her) life” when she went to the emergency room on Dec. 15.
“I just wasn’t functioning like a normal human being,” Jabeen says.
Told she was dehydrated, Jabeen was given fluids and a blood test and sent home. Four days later, she returned to hospital.
“They told me that since you’re 18 weeks, there’s nothing you can do to save your baby,” says Jabeen, who moved to Toronto from Pakistan five years ago.
Jabeen later learned she had listeriosis and an autopsy revealed her baby was infected, too.
“It broke my heart to read that report because I was just imagining my baby drinking poisoned amniotic fluid inside of me. The womb is a place where your baby is supposed to be the safest,” Jabeen said.
Jabeen’s case is likely not included in PHAC’s count. Jabeen says she was called by Health Canada and asked what dairy and fresh produce she ate – foods more commonly associated with listeria – but not asked about plant-based beverages.
She’s pregnant again, and is due in several months. At first, she was scared to eat, not knowing what caused the infection during her last pregnancy.
“Ever since I learned about the almond, oat milk situation, I’ve been feeling a bit better knowing that it wasn’t something that I did. It was something else that caused it. It wasn’t my fault,” Jabeen said.
She’s since joined a proposed class action lawsuit launched by LPC Avocates against the manufacturers and sellers of Silk and Great Value plant-based beverages. The lawsuit has not yet been certified by a judge.
Natalie Grant and her seven year-old daughter, Bowmanville, Ont.
Natalie Grant says she was in a hospital waiting room when she saw a television news report about the recall. She wondered if the dark chocolate almond milk her daughter drank daily was contaminated.
She had brought the girl to hospital because she was vomiting every half hour, constantly on the toilet with diarrhea, and had severe pain in her abdomen.
“I’m definitely thinking that this is a pretty solid chance that she’s got listeria at this point because I knew she had all the symptoms,” Grant says of seeing the news report.
Once her daughter could hold fluids, they went home and Grant cross-checked the recalled product code – 7825 – with the one on her carton. They matched.
“I called the emerg and I said I’m pretty confident she’s been exposed,” Grant said. She was told to return to the hospital if her daughter’s symptoms worsened. An hour and a half later, her fever spiked, the vomiting returned, her face flushed and her energy plummeted.
Grant says they were sent to a hospital in Ajax, Ont. and stayed two weeks while her daughter received antibiotics four times a day until she was discharged July 23.
“Knowing that my little one was just so affected and how it affected us as a family alone, there’s a bitterness left behind,” Grant said. She’s also joined the proposed class action.
Thelma Feldman, 89, Toronto
Thelma Feldman says she regularly taught yoga to friends in her condo building before getting sickened by listeria on July 2. Now, she has a walker and her body aches. She has headaches and digestive problems.
“I’m kind of depressed,” she says.
“It’s caused me a lot of physical and emotional pain.”
Much of the early days of her illness are a blur. She knows she boarded an ambulance with profuse diarrhea on July 2 and spent five days at North York General Hospital. Afterwards, she remembers Health Canada officials entering her apartment and removing Silk almond milk from her fridge, and volunteers from a community organization giving her sponge baths.
“At my age, 89, I’m not a kid anymore and healing takes longer,” Feldman says.
“I don’t even feel like being with people. I just sit at home.”
Jasmine Jiles and three-year-old Max, Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, Que.
Jasmine Jiles says her three-year-old son Max came down with flu-like symptoms and cradled his ears in what she interpreted as a sign of pain, like the one pounding in her own head, around early July.
When Jiles heard about the recall soon after, she called Danone Canada, the plant-based milk manufacturer, to find out if their Silk coconut milk was in the contaminated batch. It was, she says.
“My son is very small, he’s very young, so I asked what we do in terms of overall monitoring and she said someone from the company would get in touch within 24 to 48 hours,” Jiles says from a First Nations reserve near Montreal.
“I never got a call back. I never got an email”
At home, her son’s fever broke after three days, but gas pains stuck with him, she says. It took a couple weeks for him to get back to normal.
“In hindsight, I should have taken him (to the hospital) but we just tried to see if we could nurse him at home because wait times are pretty extreme,” Jiles says, “and I don’t have child care at the moment.”
Joseph Desmond, 50, Sydney, N.S.
Joseph Desmond says he suffered a seizure and fell off his sofa on July 9. He went to the emergency room, where they ran an electroencephalogram (EEG) test, and then returned home. Within hours, he had a second seizure and went back to hospital.
His third seizure happened the next morning while walking to the nurse’s station.
In severe cases of listeriosis, bacteria can spread to the central nervous system and cause seizures, according to Health Canada.
“The last two months have really been a nightmare,” says Desmond, who has joined the proposed lawsuit.
When he returned home from the hospital, his daughter took a carton of Silk dark chocolate almond milk out of the fridge and asked if he had heard about the recall. By that point, Desmond says he was on his second two-litre carton after finishing the first in June.
“It was pretty scary. Terrifying. I honestly thought I was going to die.”
Cheryl McCombe, 63, Haliburton, Ont.
The morning after suffering a second episode of vomiting, feverish sweats and diarrhea in the middle of the night in early July, Cheryl McCombe scrolled through the news on her phone and came across the recall.
A few years earlier, McCombe says she started drinking plant-based milks because it seemed like a healthier choice to splash in her morning coffee. On June 30, she bought two cartons of Silk cashew almond milk.
“It was on the (recall) list. I thought, ‘Oh my God, I got listeria,’” McCombe says. She called her doctor’s office and visited an urgent care clinic hoping to get tested and confirm her suspicion, but she says, “I was basically shut down at the door.”
Public Health Ontario does not recommend listeria testing for infected individuals with mild symptoms unless they are at risk of developing severe illness, such as people who are immunocompromised, elderly, pregnant or newborn.
“No wonder they couldn’t connect the dots,” she adds, referencing that it took close to a year for public health officials to find the source of the outbreak.
“I am a woman in my 60s and sometimes these signs are of, you know, when you’re vomiting and things like that, it can be a sign in women of a bigger issue,” McCombe says. She was seeking confirmation that wasn’t the case.
Disappointed, with her stomach still feeling off, she says she decided to boost her gut health with probiotics. After a couple weeks she started to feel like herself.
But since then, McCombe says, “I’m back on Kawartha Dairy cream in my coffee.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
VANCOUVER – Mayors and other leaders from several British Columbia communities say the provincial and federal governments need to take “immediate action” to tackle mental health and public safety issues that have reached crisis levels.
Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim says it’s become “abundantly clear” that mental health and addiction issues and public safety have caused crises that are “gripping” Vancouver, and he and other politicians, First Nations leaders and law enforcement officials are pleading for federal and provincial help.
In a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premier David Eby, mayors say there are “three critical fronts” that require action including “mandatory care” for people with severe mental health and addiction issues.
The letter says senior governments also need to bring in “meaningful bail reform” for repeat offenders, and the federal government must improve policing at Metro Vancouver ports to stop illicit drugs from coming in and stolen vehicles from being exported.
Sim says the “current system” has failed British Columbians, and the number of people dealing with severe mental health and addiction issues due to lack of proper care has “reached a critical point.”
Vancouver Police Chief Adam Palmer says repeat violent offenders are too often released on bail due to a “revolving door of justice,” and a new approach is needed to deal with mentally ill people who “pose a serious and immediate danger to themselves and others.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024
