Today’s coronavirus news: Ontario reports 1,873 cases of COVID-19; U.S. allows emergency use of Pfizer vaccine - Toronto Star

The latest coronavirus news from Canada and around the world Saturday. This file will be updated throughout the day. Web links to longer stories if available.

3:30 p.m. (updated): With inoculation against COVID-19 in Canada set to begin on Monday, the federal health agency said people with allergies to any of the vaccine’s ingredients should not receive it.

Two people in the United Kingdom had severe allergic reactions to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, Health Canada said in a release on Saturday. Both had histories of severe allergic reactions but have recovered, the agency said.

Health Canada said it had reviewed the available evidence after the allergic reactions — which happened on Tuesday — and decided against changing its recommendations about the vaccine’s use.

The agency did say people with severe allergies should talk to their doctors before receiving a shot.

2:30 p.m.: Residents living near a poultry plant in Berwick, N.S, should get tested for COVID-19, provincial public health officials said on Saturday.

The notice came a day after an announcement that the Eden Valley Poultry plant would be closed for at least two weeks because cases of the virus were detected there.

As of Saturday, six employees had tested positive. All were self-isolating until they could be retested in the coming week.

People living in New Minas to Middleton should be tested as a precaution and there was no evidence currently of community transmission, officials said.

“I want to thank everyone at Eden Valley Poultry for working with public health in efforts to contain the virus,” Premier Stephen McNeil said in a statement.

Seven new infections were reported in Nova Scotia on Saturday, and 61 cases were active in the province.

Dr. Robert Strang, Nova Scotia’s chief medical officer of health, said he was pleased with a drop in the number of cases.

“While these results show our approach is working, they also tell us we need to continue to follow the public health measures that are in place,” Strang said.

2:30 p.m.: Officials in Newfoundland and Labrador reported three new cases of COVID-19 Saturday. Two were said to be travel related, while the source of the third infection was under investigation. There were 23 active cases in the province.

2:30 p.m.: New Brunswick reported one new case of coronavirus disease on Saturday. The person in their 20s in the Saint John region, was self-isolating, officials said.

There were currently 72 active cases in New Brunswick, with four people in hospital, including three in intensive care.

The Edmundston region in the northwest of the province was moved into the orange level of COVID-19 recovery Saturday after the number of cases doubled in just five days.

2:20 p.m.: The grim march of COVID-19 across Ontario continued unabated on Saturday, with authorities reporting another 17 people dying from the disease.

As several more regions prepared for tighter restrictions next week and total pandemic deaths in the province approached 4,000, authorities reported another sharp uptick in new cases even though the number of fatal infections was down sharply.

The latest data showed 1,873 new cases, bringing the province’s total caseload to date to 138,504. Another 47 people needed admission to hospital, and 19 more patients ended up on ventilators.

With more than half the new reported cases occurring in Toronto and neighbouring Peel and York, the stresses on front-line health workers and hospitals were showing.

10:24 a.m.: Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott is tweeting that the province has 1,873 cases of COVID-19 and nearly 65,300 tests completed since yesterday.

Locally, there are 522 new cases in Toronto, 436 in Peel Region, 185 in York Region and 109 in Hamilton. There are 1,918 more resolved cases.

The latest numbers come a day after the province announced York Region and Windsor-Essex would move into lockdown. Toronto and Peel have been in lockdown since Nov. 23.

10 a.m.: A microbiologist says Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe’s government needs to get tougher when it decides next week what its move will be over the holidays in the province’s fight against COVID-19.

The province has the second-highest rate of active infections per capita in Canada — behind Alberta and slightly ahead of Manitoba — with a weekly average of 282 new daily cases. More than 7,000 new infections have been recorded in the past month, and the number of people hospitalized and who have died has doubled.

“It doesn’t matter if we’ve flattened the curve. Right now we need to drop the curve, because we are just building up this backlog of cases and people and patients that can’t be properly served,” said microbiologist and University of Saskatchewan professor Kyle Anderson.

8:30 a.m.: Travellers who want to leave the country for a destination that requires they are COVID-free will now have to pay anywhere from $50 to $250 for a test, depending on the company.

The province stopped covering the test for asymptomatic travellers as of Monday — the latest change in what has become Ontario’s wild west of private COVID-19 testing.

Shoppers Drug Mart, which has been doing the free government testing for asymptomatic people, who meet certain criteria, since September, is now charging $199 for the travel test. A negative result is an entry requirement for some countries that allow Canadians to visit.

COVID testing is an industry that has been operating in a grey zone, without definitive guidelines from the government, and in at least one case, without clear direction on how positive test results can be reported back to public health authorities responsible for contact tracing and monitoring spread.

Although the government offers free testing — available through assessment centres for people with symptoms and close contacts of a confirmed case, among others, and at Shoppers for asymptomatic people including those who work with vulnerable populations, and until this week, travellers — some private firms, working on their own, have been charging for the same tests.

Read the full story from the Star’s Patty Winsa.

8:26 a.m.: Senior German officials are calling for tough new measures to curb the spread of coronavirus and record high cases.

The country’s disease control agency, the Robert Koch Institute, reported 28,438 confirmed cases in the past 24 hours and 496 deaths.

Germany, which had a much lower death rate than some of its large European neighbours in the spring, now has 1.3 million confirmed cases and 21,466 confirmed deaths since the start of the outbreak.

Finance Minister Olaf Scholz called for the swift closure of most stores and pledged financial support for affected businesses.

The governor of the southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, Winfried Kretschmann, says he expects a “hard lockdown” before Christmas.

Chancellor Angela Merkel is scheduled to meet the governors of Germany’s 16 states on Sunday to discuss the next steps in containing the pandemic.

8:25 a.m.: The U.S. gave the final go-ahead Friday to the nation’s first COVID-19 vaccine, marking what could be the beginning of the end of an outbreak that has killed nearly 300,000 Americans.

Shots for health workers and nursing home residents are expected to begin in the coming days after the Food and Drug Administration authorized an emergency rollout of what promises to be a strongly protective vaccine from Pfizer Inc. and its German partner BioNTech.

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Initial doses are scarce and rationed as the U.S. joins Britain and several other countries in scrambling to vaccinate as many people as possible ahead of a long, grim winter. It will take months of work to tamp down the coronavirus that has surged to catastrophic levels in recent weeks and already claimed 1.5 million lives globally.

While the FDA decision came only after public review of data from a huge ongoing study, it has also been dogged by intense political pressure from the Trump administration, which has accused the agency of being too slow and even threatened to remove FDA chief Stephen Hahn if a ruling did not come Friday.

The move sets off what will be the largest vaccination campaign in U.S. history — but it also has global ramifications because it’s a role model to many other countries facing the same decision.

8:24 a.m.: President Donald Trump has been highlighting lots of really big numbers this week: New highs for the stock market. The 100-plus House members backing a lawsuit challenging his election loss. The nearly 75 million people who voted for him.

All the while, he’s looked past other staggering and more consequential figures: The record numbers of coronavirus deaths, hospitalizations and new cases among the citizens of the nation he leads.

On Friday, Trump’s team blasted out a text with this strong, high-minded presidential message: “We will not bend. We will not break. We will never give in. We will never give up.”

But it was not a rallying cry to help shore up Americans sagging under the toll of a pandemic that on Wednesday alone killed more Americans than on D-Day or 9-11. It was part of a fundraising pitch tied to Senate races in Georgia and to Trump’s unsupported claims that Democrats are trying to “steal” the presidential election he lost.

Read the full story from the Associated Press.

8:21 a.m.: Italy could soon reclaim a record that nobody wants — the most coronavirus deaths in Europe — after the health care system again failed to protect the elderly and the government delayed imposing new restrictions.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Italy was the first country in the West to be slammed by COVID-19 and, after suffering a huge wave of death in spring, brought infections under control.

Italy then had the benefit of time and experience heading into the fall resurgence because it trailed Spain, France and Germany in recording big new clusters of infections. Yet the virus spread fast and wide, and Italy has added 28,000 dead since Sept. 1.

Read the full story from the Associated Press.

8:20 a.m.: Eight mainly Western nations accused North Korea of using the pandemic “to crack down further on the human rights of its own people,” pointing to reports of an uptick in executions related to the coronavirus and strict controls on movements in and around the capital.

Their statement was read virtually after the U.N. Security Council discussed North Korea’s human rights situation behind closed doors on Friday. Germany had sought an open meeting but Russia and China, both neighbours of North Korea, objected. Seven council members — Germany, Belgium, Dominican Republic, Estonia, France, United Kingdom and United States — joined by Japan said in the statement that North Korea was putting nuclear power and military might over its people.

The government’s decision “to prioritize its weapons programs over the needs of its people and their isolation from the international community, is inevitably worsening the impacts of the pandemic on the North Korean population,” they said. North Korea sealed its border with China, its biggest trading partner and aid benefactor, as the coronavirus started spreading in January. Kim Jong Un’s government maintains it hasn’t found a single coronavirus case on its soil, a claim disputed by outside experts.

8:20 a.m.: New Zealand and the Cook Islands say they plan to have a travel bubble in place early next year, which will allow people to fly between the two countries without going into quarantine.

The arrangement would represent the first travel bubble that New Zealand has agreed to since closing its borders when the coronavirus first hit earlier this year. New Zealand has moved cautiously on restarting international travel after stamping out community spread of the virus. Australia is currently allowing many New Zealanders to arrive without going into quarantine but that arrangement isn’t yet reciprocal.

The Cook Islands, with a population of only about 10,000, is self-governing but has close ties to New Zealand under a free-association arrangement, and its economy relies on New Zealand tourists.

8:20 a.m.: Tokyo reported 621 new coronavirus cases Saturday, setting a record in the capital where a lack of government measures triggered concerns about a surge during the holiday season. Nationwide, Japan reported a total of 174,000 cases, with about 2,500 deaths.

Experts on a Tokyo metropolitan task force say serious cases are on the rise, putting burdens on hospitals and forcing many of them to scale back on care for other patients. Japan issued a non-binding state of emergency in the spring and has survived earlier infection peaks without a lockdown.

The coronavirus task force on Friday asked the national government to take tougher steps to slow social and economic activities, such as suspension of out-of-town trips and requesting shorter business hours in areas where infections are accelerating.

Latest data shows that ongoing measures have been ineffective and the situation could worsen during the holiday season.

8:19 a.m.: South Korea has reported 950 new coronavirus cases, its largest daily increase since the emergence of the pandemic, as fears grow about overwhelmed hospitals in the greater capital area.

The figures released Saturday brought the country’s caseload to 41,736, after health officials added more than 8,900 cases in the last 15 days alone. Six COVID-19 patients died in the past 24 hours to bring the death toll to 578.

Nearly 680 of the new cases came from the densely populated Seoul metropolitan area, where health workers have struggled to track transmissions popping up from just about everywhere, including hospitals, long-term care facilities, restaurants, saunas, schools and army units.

Infections were also reported in other major urban centres, including Busan, Gwangju, Daejeon, Ulsan and Daegu, a southeastern city that was the epicentre of the spring outbreak.

The government had eased its social distancing restrictions to the lowest tier in October despite experts warning about a viral surge during colder weather, when people spend longer hours indoors.

5 a.m.: Ali Mansour spent his first two weeks in Canada watching through a window as winter give way to spring and squirrels ran across the lawn.

As one of the last refugees to arrive in Canada before the border closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it still felt like freedom.

“It felt like I was in a movie,” he said via an interpreter in an interview with The Canadian Press from his home in Waterloo, Ont.

For Mansour and thousands of refugees set to start new lives in Canada this year — and for the community groups providing them financial and social support — the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic may reverberate for years.

Mansour, 31, fled Syria in 2017 to escape military service. Through a connection, he became acquainted with Aleya Hassan’s family in Canada.

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2020-12-12 20:36:59Z
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