The latest coronavirus news from Canada and around the world Sunday. This file will be updated throughout the day. Web links to longer stories if available.
7:50 a.m. As Quebec Conservative Leader Éric Duhaime arrived at a rally last Tuesday, he wore a mask, unlike most of the supporters he was greeting.
In a province where opposition parties have generally backed the government’s COVID-19 restrictions, Duhaime has built support through his opposition to lockdown measures. His party, who received less than two per cent of the vote in Quebec’s 2018 provincial election when it was led by Adrien Pouliot, is now regularly polling in second or third place.
“There’s a lot of people currently in Quebec who are upset, and I think we’re becoming the voice of those people,” Duhaime said in an interview last week. “For the last two years, with the management of the crisis, the government sacrificed a lot of people and those people have suffered a lot.”
But while Duhaime is tapping into people’s anger over pandemic restrictions, the mask he wore last week is a sign of the fine line he walks as he tries to turn his party into a genuine political force in the province ahead of an election this fall.
Read more from The Canadian Press.
7:30 am. When Ontario launched its rapid testing program in the fall of 2020, Premier Doug Ford touted the swabs as “game changers” in the pandemic battle. As infections ripped through front-line workers in hard-hit areas like Brampton and Toronto’s northwest corner, the province hailed the initiative as a vital tool to stem the tide.
Over the next 10 months, however, just one-fifth of the 20.7 million taxpayer-funded COVID-19 rapid tests distributed through the program went to hot spot neighborhoods, according to provincial data obtained by the Star and never before seen by the public.
And while the province got rapid tests to some crowded workplaces and areas of high transmission at this crucial time when vaccines were only just rolling out, the internal data show that only a fraction of the tests went to communities the province designated internally as “high priority” .”
Meanwhile, the government gave private schools almost 175,000 free rapid tests — more than went to paramedics, daycares, shelters and jails combined, a Star analysis of the data reveals. The pipeline to private schools was not being closely monitored by the Education Ministry, which was still advising that the tests were not necessary for public school students on the recommendation of Ontario’s chief medical officer of health.
Read the Star investigation by Sara Mojtehedzadeh and Rachel Mendleson.
7:15 a.m. India began offering booster doses of COVID-19 vaccine to all adults on Sunday but limited free shots at government to front-line workers and people over age 60.
The doses, which India is calling a “precautionary” shot instead of a booster, are available to people nine months after they receive their second jab, the Health Ministry said in a statement Friday. Those outside the two priority categories will need to pay for the shots at privately run facilities, the ministry said.
Unlike other countries, where many people receive a different vaccine as a booster, most Indians have received the same type—in most cases the AstraZeneca vaccine produced by India’s Serum Institute, the world’s largest vaccine maker. It accounts for nearly 90 per cent of all doses that have been administered in India, even though emergency approvals have been given for eight vaccines.
7 am Britain stands out in Europe because it ditched all mitigation policies in February, including mandatory self-isolation for those infected. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s conservative government is determined to stick to its “living with COVID” plan, but experts disagree on whether the country is coping well.
Some scientists argue it’s the right time to accept that “living with COVID” means tolerating a certain level of disruption and deaths, much like we do for seasonal flu. Others believe that Britain’s government lifted restrictions too quickly and too soon. They warned that deaths and hospital admissions could keep rising because more people over 55 — those who are most likely to get seriously ill from COVID-19 — are now getting infected despite high levels of vaccination.
Hospitals are again under strain, both from patients with the virus and huge numbers of staff off sick, said National Health Service medical director Stephen Powis.
“Blinding ourselves to this level of harm does not constitute living with a virus infection — quite the opposite,” said Stephen Griffin, a professor in medicine at the University of Leeds. “Without sufficient vaccination, ventilation, masking, isolation and testing, we will continue to ‘live with’ disruption, disease and sadly, death, as a result.”
Read more from The Associated Press.
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