Three years after the pandemic began, Canada has managed to avoid a severe COVID-19 wave this winter despite a total lack of public health restrictions, a busy indoor holiday season and a rapidly mutating virus that is still very much circulating in the population.
“We are now at a point in Canada where COVID-19 activity has reached a relatively stable state,” Canada’s chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, said at a briefing on March 10.
“While uncertainty remains about the seasonal patterns of COVID-19, the current trend suggests we may not see any major waves in the coming months.”
And new research continues to back up why: Hybrid immunity from vaccination and prior infection is holding up against hospitalizations and deaths and will likely continue to help control the severity of COVID-19 in Canada and around the world for the foreseeable future.
“We’re certainly in a much better position now than we have been at any time during the pandemic,” World Health Organization director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a news conference on Friday.
“It’s very pleasing to see that for the first time, the weekly number of reported deaths in the past four weeks has been lower than when we first used the word pandemic three years ago.”
More than 76 per cent of Canadian adults and close to 90 per cent of young adults (aged 17 to 24) are estimated to have previously had the disease as of mid-January, according to national blood donor data released by the federal government’s COVID-19 Immunity Task Force.
High levels of infection — combined with the more than 80 per cent of Canadians who’ve received at least two doses of a COVID vaccine, better treatment access and less severe infections than previous strains — have led to stronger immune protection against a virus that continues to spread globally.
“The high levels of hybrid immunity are one of the major factors explaining the contained number of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths this winter,” said Dr. Sara Carazo, an epidemiologist and researcher with the Quebec National Institute of Public Health.
“This is explained also by the intrinsic characteristics of new circulating variants, which were not causing a more severe disease than previous Omicron subvariants.”
But infection is not without risk — and vaccination is still the preferred route of acquiring immunity, due to the strong protection it provides against severe illness and the ongoing risk of COVID complications in vulnerable groups.
A health-care worker prepares a COVID-19 vaccine at a clinic in the Vancouver Convention Centre in January 2022. A growing body of research has consistently shown that the hybrid protection from vaccination and infection is superior to immunity from prior infection alone. (Ben Nelms/CBC)
Hybrid immunity offers strongest protection
A growing body of research has consistently shown that the hybrid protection from vaccination and infection is superior to immunity from prior infection alone — meaning those who have previously been infected should still get vaccinated.
“Vaccine-induced immunity is what got us to the point of even asking the question of whether hybrid immunity is what’s getting us out of the pandemic,” said John Wherry, director of the Institute for Immunology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
“It doesn’t look like it’s really helping with transmission, but it almost certainly is adding to the overall population immunity in a way that’s making [new subvariants] a lot less concerning.”
A Canadian study of health-care workers in Quebec published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases in January found that two doses of an mRNA vaccine and a previous Omicron infection offered substantial protection against future infection from Omicron subvariants.
“Importantly, this protection seems to have little waning over time during one year followup, which contrasts with the loss of effectiveness with time among persons vaccinated but not previously infected,” said Carazo, the lead author of the study.
“We also observed that protection from hybrid immunity was maintained even for distant variants and subvariants compared with protection from infection alone.”
Medical staff are shown at Jean-Talon Hospital in Montreal in October 2021. A recent Canadian study of health-care workers in Quebec found that two doses of an mRNA vaccine and a previous Omicron infection offered substantial protection against future infection from Omicron subvariants. (Ivanoh Demers/Radio-Canada)
Carazo’s research also found that those with a previous infection had a 90 per cent risk reduction of BA.4/5 hospitalization when combined with vaccination, compared with only about 70 per cent if they were unvaccinated and had immunity from infection alone.
“It’s safe to say that the relative lack of severity of the waves that we’ve seen here is because of immunity — it’s hard to argue anything differently than that,” said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist and professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
“And obviously, given what fraction of the population has had a prior infection, you would have to think that hybrid immunity is a big part of that.”
Vaccination ‘the safest way to get immunity’
A new study of 613 patients published this week in Science Translational Medicine found that people who had received a COVID-19 vaccine after an infection showed much stronger immune responses than those who were either only vaccinated or only infected.
“The level of protection expected from hybrid immunity is significantly higher than that afforded by vaccination only or infection only,” said Thierry DeFrance, a lead author of the study and an infectious diseases researcher at the University of Lyon in France.
And a recent systematic review of 65 studies from 19 countries in The Lancet found that a previous COVID-19 infection reduced the risk of hospitalization and death from a reinfection by up to 88 per cent for at least 10 months — equivalent to two doses of an mRNA vaccine.
“Clearly, the good news is sustained protection against severe disease,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, the lead author of the review and director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle.
“The less good news is that protection against infection is not as good and wanes much more quickly, meaning that there will be continued waves of transmission even though we have a very high level of immunity from either vaccination or infection.”
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It’s also important to note that not all immunity carries the same risk, and an infection with Omicron or one of its subvariants is much different than an infection with previous variants, such as Alpha, Beta, Delta or even the original strain, prior to vaccines.
“The safest way to get immunity is through vaccination,” Murray said. “The risk you were taking was huge back in the days of Delta or even the ancestral strain, because the infection fatality rate was 10 times higher than Omicron.”
South Africa, a country that saw massive amounts of hospitalization and death following severe waves of infection early in the pandemic prior to the rollout of vaccines, is also now in a much different situation with COVID-19 due to high levels of immunity in the population.
“It has been over a year that we have had any large wave of infection that translates into hospitalization,” said Tulio de Oliveira, director of South Africa’s Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation.
“Is that long lasting? That’s the million-dollar question,” he said. “But what we know is that the current immunity wall is holding very well.”
Better access to antiviral treatments has helped
How well hybrid immunity continues to hold up in the population will determine how often additional booster doses should be offered, and it underscores the need to further protect elderly and immunocompromised Canadians who are less likely to have a prior infection.
Dr. Gaston De Serres, an epidemiologist at the Quebec National Institute of Public Health who researches hybrid immunity and co-authored the research with Dr. Sara Carazo, said the immunity landscape is drastically different in younger adults than elderly Canadians.
“Why it matters is because hospitalizations are, for the most part, occurring in elderly people,” he said.
“Having a large proportion of the younger population that has been infected helps. But the pool of individuals who are over 70 and who have not yet been infected is still quite substantial, and we may expect that future hospitalizations will, for the most part, occur in these individuals.”
De Serres said better access to antiviral treatments that can be given to older Canadians at the onset of a COVID-19 infection has helped reduce the number of hospitalizations, as well as the fact that Omicron and its subvariants appear less severe than previous strains.
“It’s not to say that Omicron or its subvariants are completely mild and not harmful — that’s not true,” he said, adding that 2022 “had more deaths than the two previous years of the pandemic.”
“Having said that, there has not been an overwhelming wave that flooded the hospital system last fall or now, and in that sense things are more under control.”
Wherry, at the University of Pennsylvania, said key goals for the future should be trying to improve on COVID-19 vaccine technology to recreate the protection that hybrid immunity provides in people who haven’t yet been vaccinated, such as children and those who are more vulnerable to severe illness.
“That still remains a major challenge, and hybrid immunity and vaccines are still not giving us a really durable benefit there,” he said.
“Immunity from severe disease may also wane. We haven’t been out long enough to really know. So I wouldn’t assume that we’re going to have five-year or 10-year immunity keeping us out of the hospital.”
The scientists tracking new COVID-19 variants — before it’s too late
The virus that causes COVID-19 continues to mutate amid reduced testing, adding to concerns that a new variant could explode before it’s detected and tracked. But Canadian labs are on the case.
The University of Arizona’s Bhattacharya said there could be some seasonal variation in terms of the severity of COVID infections — similar to the flu, where different strains emerge that are distinct from what the population had last acquired immunity to — that could drive future waves.
“But I still strongly believe that we’re not going to go back into the pre-vaccination era of early 2020,” he said. “I don’t think we’re going to see those dark days again.”
EDMONTON – Canada’s famed dinosaur hunter and one of the inspirations for the “Jurassic Park” phenomenon turned 75 earlier this year and has no plans to drop his chisel and rock hammer.
Philip Currie says he’ll keep digging until he’s one with the fossils he has spent his life unearthing.
“I decided when I was about 40 or 50 that I was going to continue until, suddenly one day in the (Alberta) Badlands, I would go poof and I’d be gone,” Currie said in an interview ahead of the museum that’s named after him celebrating its 10th anniversary.
And he says before he does go, he hopes to find an intact specimen in Alberta of his favourite dinosaur — Troodon formosus.
It’s a brainy, big-eyed dinosaur that resembles the nasty, two-legged, big-tailed and sharp-toothed velociraptor made famous in the “Jurassic Park” movie series.
“(It) was probably the most intelligent dinosaur we know,” said Currie.
“It’s got the biggest brain. It has eyes that face forward in a way that gave it binocular vision. And now we know they were feathered.”
In other parts of the world, teeth of a similar dinosaur have been found with serrations as big as those of a T. Rex’s tooth.
“We still haven’t got a complete specimen (of the Troodon formosus) anywhere in the Western North America. It’s crazy,” he said.
“I would love to see them just to learn from it and see what we got right and what we got wrong.”
The Troodon can be seen in a death pose in the logo of a museum named after Currie in Wembley in northern Alberta.
The Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum is marking its 10-year anniversary next year by exhibiting its recent and largest discovery in northern Alberta so far — the skull of a pachyrhinosaurous. The skull alone is the size of a baby elephant.
The Wembley centre is among several museums Currie has helped build in Canada and around the world, including China and Japan, as dinosaur research boomed over the course of his career.
It began when he was a 12-year-old growing up in Ontario, reading the Roy Chapman Andrews book “All About Dinosaurs” and dashing through the Royal Ontario Museum, looking at all the dinosaur displays, confident he would one day hunt some of his own.
Most of the fossils were from Alberta, so he moved there to work.
He says the province is home to the Dinosaur Provincial Park, east of Calgary, where 50 species of dinosaurs and 150 species of turtles, crocodiles, lizards, snakes, flying reptiles, mammals and fish lived together.
“That makes it one of the best sandboxes or playgrounds for somebody like me,” he said with a laugh.
On his first day out in the field, around 1976, he uncovered his first fossil: a spine. “I was holding in my hands dinosaur bones — this evidence of ancient life.”
He worked at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, but his expertise has taken him to dinosaur bonebeds all over the world, including regularly to Mongolia and China, along with the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where he teaches.
While his subjects were long gone millions of years ago, the science of digging them up has ebbed and flowed for about a century.
In the 1920s, some of the world’s first paleontologists, including Andrews, had already completed expeditions to China’s Gobi Desert, despite the warlords that ruled the area, and unearthed some of the largest dinosaur fossils seen at the time.
But until the 1970s, Currie said, the Great Depression and world wars halted further discoveries. It was further hampered by the erroneous belief there were few dinosaurs left to be found.
From the 1960s through the ’80s, paleontology grew a bit, aided by advances in technology, but remained in the shadows of popular science.
In 1993, Hollywood changed that.
Director Steven Spielberg released “Jurassic Park.” Based on the book by Michael Crichton, it told a story of paleontologists pursuing — and being pursued by — dinosaurs brought back to life.
While developing his lead character, Alan Grant, Crichton was inspired by the few paleontologists working at the time, including Currie. Crichton has acknowledged it was Currie’s research method that piqued his interest.
Currie said the book and movies have shown the world paleontology is “multidisciplinary” and that bones tell stories of not only what lived but how it lived.
Paleontologists, in turn, were viewed less as diggers and more like detectives.
“You’re, first of all, digging (evidence) up. Then you’re trying to figure out what is it or who is the victim, why did they die, why are they being found in this particular way, and what can we learn from this,” he said.
“Every time you answer one question, you end up with two more questions.”
He said the hours he has spent digging and brushing dirt off fossils in Alberta and all around the world have humbled and matured him.
“When you’re looking at dinosaurs, you look for evidence for why they became extinct,” he said.
“If dinosaurs hadn’t become extinct, what would we look like now? Even though I’m not religious, I think about these things on a bigger scale.
“It’s not just an asteroid hitting the world 65 million years ago. There is something else going on.
“Our story is incomplete.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 13, 2024.
WELLAND, Ont. – Three people are dead and two others are injured after a collision involving a pickup truck and a bus in Welland, Ont.
Police say first responders rushed to the scene of a crash at a Highway 58 address at around 10:20 p.m. Saturday.
Ontario Provincial Police say the truck had rolled over and was engulfed in flames after the head-on collision with the transit bus.
It says the truck driver and their two passengers were pronounced dead at the scene, and the bus driver was airlifted to hospital with life-threatening injuries.
Police say two passengers were on the bus at the time — one was seriously injured and sent to hospital and the other was released at the scene.
They say a portion of highway between Kleiner Street and Forks Road East will remain closed as the investigation continues.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 13, 2024.
SpaceX pulled off the boldest test flight yet of its enormous Starship rocket on Sunday, catching the returning booster back at the launch pad with mechanical arms.
A jubilant Elon Musk called it “science fiction without the fiction part.”
Towering almost 400 feet (121 meters), the empty Starship blasted off at sunrise from the southern tip of Texas near the Mexican border. It arced over the Gulf of Mexico like the four Starships before it that ended up being destroyed, either soon after liftoff or while ditching into the sea. The previous one in June had been the most successful until Sunday’s demo, completing its flight without exploding.
This time, Musk, SpaceX’s CEO and founder, upped the challenge for the rocket that he plans to use to send people back to the moon and on to Mars.
At the flight director’s command, the first-stage booster flew back to the launch pad where it had blasted off seven minutes earlier. The launch tower’s monstrous metal arms, dubbed chopsticks, caught the descending 232-foot (71-meter) stainless steel booster and gripped it tightly, dangling it well above the ground.
“The tower has caught the rocket!!” Musk announced via X. “Big step towards making life multiplanetary was made today.”
Company employees screamed in joy, jumping and pumping their fists into the air. NASA joined in the celebration, with Administrator Bill Nelson sending congratulations.
Continued testing of Starship will prepare the nation for landing astronauts at the moon’s south pole, Nelson noted. NASA’s new Artemis program is the follow-up to Apollo, which put 12 men on the moon more than a half-century ago.
“Folks, this is a day for the engineering history books,” SpaceX engineering manager Kate Tice said from SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
“Even in this day and age, what we just saw is magic,” added company spokesman Dan Huot from near the launch and landing site. “I am shaking right now.”
It was up to the flight director to decide, in real time with a manual control, whether to attempt the landing. SpaceX said both the booster and launch tower had to be in good, stable condition. Otherwise, it was going to end up in the gulf like the previous ones. Everything was judged to be ready for the catch.
The retro-looking spacecraft launched by the booster continued around the world, soaring more than 130 miles (212 kilometers) high. An hour after liftoff, it made a controlled landing in the Indian Ocean, adding to the day’s achievement. Cameras on a nearby buoy showed flames shooting up from the water as the spacecraft impacted precisely at the targeted spot and sank, as planned.
“What a day,” Huot said. “Let’s get ready for the next one.”
The June flight came up short at the end after pieces came off. SpaceX upgraded the software and reworked the heat shield, improving the thermal tiles.
SpaceX has been recovering the first-stage boosters of its smaller Falcon 9 rockets for nine years, after delivering satellites and crews to orbit from Florida or California. But they land on floating ocean platforms or on concrete slabs several miles from their launch pads — not on them.
Recycling Falcon boosters has sped up the launch rate and saved SpaceX millions. Musk intends to do the same for Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built with 33 methane-fuel engines on the booster alone.
Musk said the captured Starship booster looked to be in good shape, with just a little warping of some of the outer engines from all the heat and aerodynamic forces. That can be fixed easily, he noted.
NASA has ordered two Starships to land astronauts on the moon later this decade. SpaceX intends to use Starship to send people and supplies to the moon and, eventually Mars.
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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.
