The latest coronavirus news from Canada and around the world on Sunday. This file will be updated throughout the day. Web links to longer stories if available.
7:42 am: Jennifer Hubert took the opportunity to receive her COVID-19 vaccine, but does not expect to have to make the decision to vaccinate her three-year-old son Jackson.
She acknowledges the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, but said she also understands that her child has a much lower risk of serious illness than older adults.
“For me it is not a clear benefit,” he said.
While many parents were delighted with the news that Health Canada is considering approval of the first COVID-19 vaccine for children ages five to 11 in Canada, parents like Hubert are feeling more uneasy and public health officials said that they’re going to have a lot more nuanced conversation with parents about vaccination than they do with adults.
While 82 percent of eligible Canadians ages 12 and older are already fully vaccinated, a recent Angus Reid survey shows that only 51 percent of parents plan to immediately vaccinate their children when a pediatric dose is available.
Of parents with children in the age range of five to 11 years, 23 percent said they would never give their children a COVID-19 vaccine, 18 percent said they would wait, and nine percent said they were not. Sure, according to the survey of 5,011 Canadians between September 29 and October 3, which cannot be assigned a margin of error because online surveys are not considered random samples.
“Most of the research I’ve seen indicates that parents are more reluctant to vaccinate their children against COVID than themselves,” said Kate Allen, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Vaccine Preventable Diseases at the University of Toronto.
7:41 am: British Columbia is poised to lift capacity restrictions on gatherings across much of the province on Monday, though some say not everyone will be ready to party like early 2020 while still wearing a mask.
Residents of parts of the province will be allowed to attend events such as hockey games, concerts, and weddings with no limit on the number, but capacity will be limited to 50 percent in areas where vaccination rates are low, including parts from Fraser, Northern and Inland Sanitary Regions.
Attendees of all events hosted in British Columbia will be required to wear face covers and show proof of COVID-19 vaccination.
The move was eagerly anticipated by businesses, including those that require reservations well in advance for events such as weddings.
But Harpal Sooch, owner of the Grand Taj Banquet Hall in Surrey, said that not everyone is ready for pre-pandemic-type parties while they still need to wear masks, especially older people awaiting booster shots and families with children under 12 who are not. may. still be vaccinated.
“They are not getting into it. But hopefully everything continues like this for next summer we will be fine, “he said. “That is what we are waiting for.”
Heidi Tworek, a professor who specializes in health communications at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, said employers, companies expecting more customers, and even people who invite someone to dinner should wait a variety of reactions due to lack of contact with people after almost two years will have affected the mental health of some people.
“Sometimes there is a grassroots assumption that everyone is eager to immediately return to full capacity,” he said, adding that while most people will have to get used to meeting other people outside their usual circle of contacts, people with an anxiety disorder will have a harder time being around people they don’t know.
Sunday 7:37 am: In a pair of Cape Town warehouses turned into a maze of sterile rooms with air locks, young scientists are assembling and calibrating the equipment needed to reverse engineer a coronavirus vaccine that has yet to reach South Africa and the majority. of the poorest people in the world.
The energy in the gleaming labs matches the urgency of their mission to reduce vaccine disparities. By working to replicate Moderna’s injection of COVID-19, scientists are succeeding in ending an industry that has highly prioritized rich countries over poor ones in both sales and manufacturing.
And they are doing so with the unusual backing of the World Health Organization, which is coordinating a vaccine research, training and production center in South Africa alongside a related supply chain for critical raw materials. It’s a last-resort effort to make fixes for people who don’t have it, and the intellectual property implications are still murky.
“We’re doing this for Africa right now, and that drives us,” said Emile Hendricks, a 22-year-old biotechnologist at Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines, the company trying to reproduce Moderna’s jab. “We can no longer trust these great superpowers to come and save us.”
Read the news about the coronavirus on Saturday.
Reference-www.thestar.com