Mask mandates are lifting in hospitals, long-term care homes and other health-care facilities across the country, marking an end to some of the last remaining public health restrictions against COVID-19 in Canada.
But what changes for patients and health-care workers may not be clear-cut, as the lifting of mandates doesn’t mean an end to masking altogether — and health officials stress that mandates could return to health care in the future, if COVID levels take a turn for the worse.
“Clearly masks are important in health-care settings, we’ve used them always, and I’ve been a big supporter of mask wearing when it’s appropriate,” Dr. Bonnie Henry, B.C. provincial health officer and chair of the council of chief medical officers of health, told CBC News.
“Nobody is telling you not to wear a mask, what we’re saying is it’s no longer mandatory by a provincial health officer order that everybody do it all the time.”
Canadians can expect many areas of hospitals to still encourage masking in emergency rooms and departments with particularly vulnerable patients, like burn units and cancer wards — and health-care workers will still likely wear them in many patient-facing settings.
“If you want to or your provider wants to, masks will certainly be available. So I think it’s going to be a gradual transition,” Dr. Saqib Shahab, Saskatchewan’s chief medical health officer, told CBC Saskatchewan last week.
“We really hope outbreaks won’t rise as a result of this policy … but it’s something that I think all of us have a role to play in minimizing that risk.”
But reaction to the policy change has been mixed, with some health-care worker unions and advocates arguing the move will shift public health responsibilities onto individuals and could even equate to a violation of human rights for high-risk patients.
Registered nurse Janelle Van Haltren prepares to attend to a patient in the Humber River Hospital emergency departing on Jan. 13, 2022. Canadians can expect many areas of hospitals to still encourage masking — and health-care workers will still likely wear them in many patient-facing settings. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)
Lifting mandates could reduce health-care burnout
Part of the reasoning behind the shift in policy is to remove the need for health-care workers, who have faced severe burnout throughout the pandemic, to constantly mask in every area of the hospital — while also still allowing them the freedom to continue to do so.
“We know that most of our staff, when they got infected, weren’t getting infected at work, they were getting infected in the community,” said Dr. Michael Gardam, an infectious disease specialist and CEO of Health P.E.I.
“And so really the time has kind of come and gone for this and we need to get to a new state where we are masking when we need to — but not routinely, everyday, everywhere.”
Dr. Alon Vaisman, an infection control physician at Toronto’s University Health Network (UHN) and assistant medical professor at the University of Toronto, said removing universal mask mandates in all health-care settings would likely help to ease health-care worker burnout.
“I absolutely see the reasoning there, because it seems like a very low-risk manoeuvre. I think it’s important to recognize that if you take health-care workers, for example, they’ve been working extremely hard the last three years,” he said.
“And if there’s anything we can do to try to alleviate the stress, if you could remove masking where it’s no longer necessary and where the risk is extremely low, I think if you could do that it’s very helpful to reduce burnout.”
Mask mandates lifted at Sask. Health Authority facilities
Mask mandates at Saskatchewan Health Authority facilities have been lifted.
Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, said hospitals should be able to independently set policies on masking depending on local COVID levels and expert advice.
“When you’re talking about non-patient facing activities, I don’t think that there’s much benefit in having masks in place,” he said.
“There is benefit in patient-facing activities to having people wear masks, but I think it’s something that each hospital needs to make a determination on based on the local metrics and not really something for the government to necessarily be involved in.”
Alberta is still requiring masks in patient-facing settings, Quebec and Ontario are leaving masking rules up to individual hospitals, while Manitoba has opted to still require masks in health-care settings for the time being.
“If you’re in an immunocompromised-facing service, these policies make sense,” said Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious diseases fellow at Stanford University and physician and researcher in Stanford, Calif.
“Now whether we should keep mask mandates in place at all hospitals, for all patients, in all services, that’s more debatable.”
Surgical oncologists Dr. Usmaan Hameed, right, and Dr. Peter Stotland, left, walk to the operating room at North York General Hospital in May 2020. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)
Ethical debate over removing mask mandates in hospitals
B.C.’s Human Rights Commissioner Kasari Govender raised concerns about the decision to lift mandatory masking in health-care settings, saying they are the one space vulnerable people should be able to rely on to prioritize their safety — particularly in long-term care facilities.
“The removal of mask mandates has a disproportionate impact on marginalized people, seniors, and those who are clinically extremely vulnerable,” Govender said in a statement this week.
“This represents a violation of their rights to equal participation in our communities.”
B.C. lifts mandatory masking in health care and proof of vaccination for long-term care visitors
B.C. is ending its universal mask mandate in health care settings, Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry announced Thursday. Visitors to long-term care and assisted living facilities will also no longer need to show proof of a COVID-19 vaccination.
The Canadian Union of Public Employees, which represents over 200,000 health-care workers across the country, said in a statement to CBC News it’s not acceptable for governments to allow employers to “download workplace safety onto front-line workers.”
“That ignores the fundamental responsibility of employers to provide a safe work environment,” CUPE’s National President Mark Hancock said.
“Leaving the decision over infection controls in the work environment to individual employees is never okay. It’s especially concerning in a health-care setting where people are already ill and at risk.”
Vaisman said the overall benefit derived from universal mask mandates in all health-care settings at this point in the pandemic isn’t as strong as it once was.
“What we’ve seen throughout the pandemic is that the morbidity and mortality associated with COVID, the likelihood that you’ll be admitted to hospital if you get COVID, has substantially fallen over the last few years,” he said.
“Our primary objective is always to keep patients safe … but it’s important to recognize that the risk to patients has dramatically changed over the last few years because of vaccination, because of previous infection, because of therapeutics.”
Surgical oncologists Dr. Usmaan Hameed operates on a patient in North York General Hospital on May 26, 2020. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)
Vaisman said masking will remain in all traditionally high-risk areas in UHN hospitals, and patients entering emergency departments will still need to mask up — but fewer people will likely be wearing them in common spaces such as lobbies, hallways and elevators.
“So in certain settings where we think the risk is lower, you won’t see health-care workers masked as often as you did in the past,” he said. “I think the Canadian public will start to notice that masking is becoming less and less common in health-care settings.”
“We no longer need that additional level of protection all the time, because of what we’re seeing with the epidemiology in the community and our health-care settings — we don’t have any outbreaks in long term care right now of influenza or COVID [in B.C.],” she said.
“So the setting is different and we need to adapt to that, we need to get back to a more normal way of interacting.”
A nurse gowns up before attending to a patient in the intensive care unit of Humber River Hospital in Toronto, on Jan. 25, 2022. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)
Mask mandates could return if COVID levels worsen
Canada avoided a severe winter COVID-19 wave despite a lack of most of public health restrictions, a busy indoor holiday season and a rapidly mutating virus — largely thanks to high levels of hybrid immunity from vaccination and prior infection.
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.
Bivalent vaccines, which were designed to target the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants, were also associated with a lower risk of severe infection with several later members of the Omicron family, researchers wrote in new correspondence in the New England Journal of Medicine.
But COVID hospitalization levels still remain stubbornly high in Canada, with 3,268 hospital beds occupied by COVID patients across the country according to the latest federal data, despite continuing to gradually decline since mid-January.
“We’re not done with this yet. COVID is going to be around and it’s an additional infection that is causing illness — particularly in older people, particularly in people who have immune-compromising conditions,” Henry said.
“It’s going to be really important when we get to next respiratory season, that we’ll be looking again at whether universal masking through that period of time when the risk is high, not just for COVID, but for influenza, for RSV, for other respiratory viruses as well.”
Gardam said that while it makes sense to lift mask mandates in hospitals for now, a worsening situation with COVID or other respiratory illnesses later could change that.
“If we have a large outbreak of influenza or RSV or COVID in the future as we get into the winter seasons, I think it’ll be quite reasonable to bring back masking in hospitals in certain areas, then taking it away again when the epidemiology suggests that it’s safe,” he said.
“There’s no doubt masks had benefit during the pandemic, along with the other pandemic control measures that we had … we need to figure out what that middle ground is.”
NEW YORK (AP) — Teen smoking hit an all-time low in the U.S. this year, part of a big drop in the youth use of tobacco overall, the government reported Thursday.
There was a 20% drop in the estimated number of middle and high school students who recently used at least one tobacco product, including cigarettes, electronic cigarettes, nicotine pouches and hookahs. The number went from 2.8 million last year to 2.25 million this year — the lowest since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s key survey began in 1999.
“Reaching a 25-year low for youth tobacco product use is an extraordinary milestone for public health,” said Deirdre Lawrence Kittner, director of CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, in a statement. However, “our mission is far from complete.”
A previously reported drop in vaping largely explains the overall decline in tobacco use from 10% to about 8% of students, health officials said.
The youth e-cigarette rate fell to under 6% this year, down from 7.7% last year — the lowest at any point in the last decade. E-cigarettes are the most commonly used tobacco products among teens, followed by nicotine pouches.
Use of other products has been dropping, too.
Twenty-five years ago, nearly 30% of high school students smoked. This year, it was just 1.7%, down from the 1.9%. That one-year decline is so small it is not considered statistically significant, but marks the lowest since the survey began 25 years ago. The middle school rate also is at its lowest mark.
Recent use of hookahs also dropped, from 1.1% to 0.7%.
The results come from an annual CDC survey, which included nearly 30,000 middle and high school students at 283 schools. The response rate this year was about 33%.
Officials attribute the declines to a number of measures, ranging from price increases and public health education campaigns to age restrictions and more aggressive enforcement against retailers and manufacturers selling products to kids.
Among high school students, use of any tobacco product dropped to 10%, from nearly 13% and e-cigarette use dipped under 8%, from 10%. But there was no change reported for middle school students, who less commonly vape or smoke or use other products,
Current use of tobacco fell among girls and Hispanic students, but rose among American Indian or Alaska Native students. And current use of nicotine pouches increased among white kids.
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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.
WASHINGTON (AP) — An Alabama man was arrested Thursday for his alleged role in the January hack of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission social media account that led the price of bitcoin to spike, the Justice Department said.
Eric Council Jr., 25, of Athens, is accused of helping to break into the SEC’s account on X, formerly known as Twitter, allowing the hackers to prematurely announce the approval of long-awaited bitcoin exchange-traded funds.
The price of bitcoin briefly spiked more than $1,000 after the post claimed “The SEC grants approval for #Bitcoin ETFs for listing on all registered national securities exchanges.”
But soon after the initial post appeared, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said on his personal account that the SEC’s account was compromised. “The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products,” Gensler wrote, calling the post unauthorized without providing further explanation.
Authorities say Council carried out what’s known as a “SIM swap,” using a fake ID to impersonate someone with access to the SEC’s X account and convince a cellphone store to give him a SIM card linked to the person’s phone. Council was able to take over the person’s cellphone number and get access codes to the SEC’s X account, which he shared with others who broke into the account and sent the post, the Justice Department says.
Prosecutors say after Council returned the iPhone he used for the SIM swap, his online searches included: “What are the signs that you are under investigation by law enforcement or the FBI even if you have not been contacted by them.”
An email seeking comment was sent Thursday to an attorney for Council, who is charged in Washington’s federal court with conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft and access device fraud.
The price of bitcoin swung from about $46,730 to just below $48,000 after the unauthorized post hit on Jan. 9 and then dropped to around $45,200 after the SEC’s denial. The SEC officially approved the first exchange-traded funds that hold bitcoin the following day.
Google, Meta and TikTok have removed social media accounts belonging to an industrial plant in Russia’s Tatarstan region aimed at recruiting young foreign women to make drones for Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
Posts on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok were taken down following an investigation by The Associated Press published Oct. 10 that detailed working conditions in the drone factory in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, which is under U.S. and British sanctions.
Videos and other posts on the social media platforms promised the young women, who are largely from Africa, a free plane ticket to Russia and a salary of more than $500 a month following their recruitment via the program called “Alabuga Start.”
But instead of a work-study program in areas like hospitality and catering, some of them said they learned only arriving in the Tatarstan region that they would be toiling in a factory to make weapons of war, assembling thousands of Iranian-designed attack drones to be launched into Ukraine.
In interviews with AP, some of the women who worked in the complex complained of long hours under constant surveillance, of broken promises about wages and areas of study, and of working with caustic chemicals that left their skin pockmarked and itching. AP did not identify them by name or nationality out of concern for their safety.
The tech companies also removed accounts for Alabuga Polytechnic, a vocational boarding school for Russians aged 16-18 and Central Asians aged 18-22 that bills its graduates as experts in drone production.
The accounts collectively had at least 158,344 followers while one page on TikTok had more than a million likes.
In a statement, YouTube said its parent company Google is committed to sanctions and trade compliance and “after review and consistent with our policies, we terminated channels associated with Alabuga Special Economic Zone.”
Meta said it removed accounts on Facebook and Instagram that “violate our policies.” The company said it was committed to complying with sanctions laws and said it recognized that human exploitation is a serious problem which required a multifaceted approach, including at Meta.
It said it had teams dedicated to anti-trafficking efforts and aimed to remove those seeking to abuse its platforms.
TikTok said it removed videos and accounts which violated its community guidelines, which state it does not allow content that is used for the recruitment of victims, coordination of their transport, and their exploitation using force, fraud, coercion, or deception.
The women aged 18-22 were recruited to fill an urgent labor shortage in wartime Russia. They are from places like Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, as well as the South Asian country of Sri Lanka. The drive also is expanding to elsewhere in Asia as well as Latin America.
Accounts affiliated to Alabuga with tens of thousands of followers are still accessible on Telegram, which did not reply to a request for comment. The plant’s management also did not respond to AP.
The Alabuga Start recruiting drive used a robust social media campaign of slickly edited videos with upbeat music that show African women smiling while cleaning floors, wearing hard hats while directing cranes, and donning protective equipment to apply paint or chemicals.
Videos also showed them enjoying Tatarstan’s cultural sites or playing sports. None of the videos made it clear the women would be working in a drone manufacturing complex.
Online, Alabuga promoted visits to the industrial area by foreign dignitaries, including some from Brazil, Sri Lanka and Burkina Faso.
In a since-deleted Instagram post, a Turkish diplomat who visited the plant had compared Alabuga Polytechnic to colleges in Turkey and pronounced it “much more developed and high-tech.”
According to Russian investigative outlets Protokol and Razvorot, some pupils at Alabuga Polytechnic are as young as 15 and have complained of poor working conditions.
Videos previously on the platforms showed the vocational school students in team-building exercises such as “military-patriotic” paintball matches and recreating historic Soviet battles while wearing camouflage.
Last month, Alabuga Start said on Telegram its “audience has grown significantly!”
That could be due to its hiring of influencers, who promoted the site on TikTok and Instagram as an easy way for young women to make money after leaving school.
TikTok removed two videos promoting Alabuga after publication of the AP investigation.
Experts told AP that about 90% of the women recruited via the Alabuga Start program work in drone manufacturing.
