Today’s coronavirus news: Ontario reporting 1,076 more cases, 18 deaths, including 12 in long-term care; Details on new quarantine measures for Canadian travellers set to be unveiled
The latest coronavirus news from Canada and around the world Thursday. This file will be updated throughout the day. Web links to longer stories if available.
10:30 a.m.: Ontario is reporting 12 more deaths among long-term-care residents for a total of 3,706 since the pandemic began.
There are 14 fewer long-term-care homes in outbreak for a total of 180 (or 28.8 per cent of LTC homes in the province).
10:17 a.m.: Locally, there are 361 new cases in Toronto, 210 in Peel and 122 in York Region.
10:15 a.m.: Ontario is reporting 1,076 more COVID-19 cases and 18 deaths in the province.
The seven-day average is down to 1,180 cases daily or 57 weekly per 100,000, and down to 27.7 deaths/day.
The labs report 62,012 completed tests, with a 2.2 per cent positivity rate.
10 a.m.: The federal government is promising more details on new quarantine rules for incoming travellers Friday.
A mandatory three-day quarantine for air travellers arriving in Canada was announced last month.
But details of how the program will work and when it will take effect have yet to be revealed.
What's known now is that the order requires those arriving in Canada to take a COVID-19 test upon arrival at their own cost, and then pay for a 72-hour stay at a government-approved facility.
Federal officials are expected to release more information at a news conference later Friday.
The measures come as new variants of the novel coronavirus are sweeping the globe and proving to be harder to contain.
9:40 a.m. With a new, highly contagious coronavirus variant gaining force in the already hard-hit Czech Republic, the country is in chaos after Parliament deprived the government of a powerful tool to tackle the pandemic.
The lower house of Czech Parliament late Thursday refused the minority government's request to extend the state of emergency, a measure that gives the Cabinet the powers to impose and keep in place strict nationwide restrictive measures and limit people's rights.
Ministers have warned the move will further worsen the situation and might cause the struggling health system to collapse.
The opposition parties charged the current lockdown doesn't work and accused the government of Prime Minister Andrej Babis of not doing enough for businesses and others affected by its restrictions.
They also complained the government has been refusing to take seriously their proposals to deal with the pandemic, and insisted schools should reopen.
The current state of emergency will expire at week's end after 132 days. The government can use other legal options to reimpose some measures but not all of them.
8:26 a.m. Air Canada says it lost $1.16 billion in the final three months of last year, releasing a financial report on the heels of last night's news that the Canadian government approved Air Canada's $190-million purchase of Transat A.T.
Air Canada's fourth quarter financial report, released this morning, says the company had a net loss of $1.16 billion or $3.91 per diluted share in the fourth quarter of 2020, compared with profit of $152 million or 56 cents per diluted share in the fourth quarter of 2019.
The airline's operating revenue dropped to $827 million in the fourth quarter, down from $4.43 billion in the same three months of 2019, as the COVID-19 pandemic has hampered air travel.
Analysts polled by financial data firm Refinitiv expected Air Canada to lose $735.67 million dollars, or $2.84 per share, on revenue of $885.36 million.
Chief executive Calin Rovinescu says the 2020 financial year was the bleakest in the history of commercial aviation, as the number of passengers declined 73 per cent following several years of record growth for Air Canada.
8:20 a.m. Any time someone brings up the idea of pandemic babies on the social media feeds, someone jokes that this generation will consist entirely of first-born children.
Talk of a COVID baby bust is emerging since, anecdotally speaking, it looks as if few overwhelmed parents are busy trying for a second (or third) child, since the ordeal's already been especially hard on parents.
We found one having a second, though: Lindsay Bell, a 42-year-old assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Western University. She's working full-time and looking after a toddler and expecting her second in June. Bell and her partner had actually planned to do an in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment when their son turned one, but the fertility clinics were closed.
8:11 a.m. For 11 months Canadians have been counselled to stay home. But given the time and stillness to reflect what they want from a home, many have found the pandemic has nudged them to change their surroundings.
Much has been written about the outflow of Torontonians seeking more space indoors and out in the suburbs and secondary centres. Housing experts say COVID-19 has accelerated a trend that was underway before the pandemic and the tide away from big cities isn't unique to Toronto - it's happening around the world.
Statistics Canada reports that between July 1, 2019, and July 1, 2020, 50,375 more people moved out of the Toronto than arrived from other parts of Ontario, even though the city's population continues to grow overall.
Read the full story from the Star's Tess Kalinowski
7:35 a.m. The spread of the B.1.1.7 variant of COVID-19 in Ontario has seen an average daily growth rate of just over 12 per cent since late January, a new Star analysis finds, prompting infectious disease experts to urge vigilance when it comes to following public health measures.
The Star's analysis of publicly available data shows that Peel, York and Toronto have led the GTA in average daily growth in B.1.1.7 cases since Jan. 28, the date the province started reporting variant cases.
So far, health officials have confirmed fewer than 300 B.1.1.7. infections in Ontario, providing a very small sample size for analysis. However, the provincewide increase from about 50 cases in late January to 236 as of Wednesday is in line with public health warnings about the variant's greater transmissibility.
Read the full story from the Star's Ed Tubb and Kenyon Wallace
6 a.m. Behind closed doors, the Office of the Chief Coroner is examining the deaths of migrant workers who contracted COVID-19 on Ontario farms last spring in a confidential review that is proceeding without key representatives of temporary foreign workers.
It is not the public inquest many advocates and experts say is urgently needed to give answers to grieving families, shine a light on migrant work and provide lessons to authorities aimed at preventing future deaths. Three migrant farm workers died of COVID-19 last year, and roughly 1,700 others fell sick.
This is not a process that ensures that migrant worker voices or concerns are adequately heard," said Syed Hussan, executive director of Migrant Workers Alliance for Change (MWAC).
The secrecy of the review raises questions about how rigorous it will be at a time when the man who heads the coroner's office - Dr. Dirk Huyer - is also in a lead COVID response role for the provincial government, which has been criticized for its inadequate response to the farm outbreaks.
Huyer is in charge of the province's outbreak response, which includes preventing and minimizing outbreaks on farms, and previously led Ontario's COVID testing approach.
The Office of the Chief Coroner did not respond to questions about the review or acknowledge its existence. Two former coroners told the Star this level of secrecy is not in keeping with the duty the coroner's office has to ensure public confidence.
Read the full investigation from the Star's Sara Mojtehedzadeh and Rachel Mendleson on how after months of calls for a public inquest into the COVID-19 deaths of migrant farm workers, Ontario coroner's office has launched a secretive review.
5:08 a.m. Portugal is getting more help from its European Union partners to ease pressure on hospitals crunched by the pandemic, with France and Luxembourg the latest countries to offer medical workers.
The Portuguese health ministry says France is sending a doctor and three nurses, while Luxembourg is providing two doctors and two nurses.
The health ministry said in a statement late Thursday the medics should arrive next week.
The German army sent eight doctors and 18 nurses earlier this month to help at a Lisbon hospital.
The number of COVID-19 patients in hospital and in intensive care fell Thursday for the third straight day, but Portugal's seven-day average of daily deaths remained the world's highest, at 1.97 per 100,000 people, according to Johns Hopkins University.
5:05 a.m. Melbourne, Australia's second-largest city, will begin its third lockdown on Friday due to a rapidly spreading COVID-19 cluster centred on hotel quarantine.
The five-day lockdown will be enforced across Victoria state to prevent the virus spreading from the state capital, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said.
The Australian Open tennis tournament will be allowed to continue but without spectators, he said.
Only international flights that were already in the air when the lockdown was announced will be allowed to land at Melbourne Airport. Schools and many businesses will be closed. Residents are ordered to stay at home except to exercise and for essential purposes.
A population of 6.5 million will be locked down from 11:59 p.m. until the same time on Wednesday because of a contagious British variant of the virus first detected at a Melbourne Airport hotel that has infected 13 people.
Andrews said the rate of spread demanded drastic action to avoid a new surge in Melbourne.
The game has changed. This thing is not the 2020 virus. It is very different. It is much faster. It spreads much more easily," Andrews told reporters. I am confident that this short, sharp circuit breaker will be effective. We will be able to smother this."
4:57 a.m. The latest rules for travellers arriving in Canada are ruffling feathers among snowbirds wintering south of the border, while those who stayed home wonder why thousands opted to travel during the pandemic.
Valorie Crooks, Canada research chair in health service geographies, said everyone has had access to the same public health information and snowbirds who flocked south did what they felt was allowable."
There is no ban on travel and snowbirds don't think of themselves as vacationers, said Crooks, a professor at Simon Fraser University who's done research for years with snowbird communities in Florida and Arizona.
They're viewing this as part of their life or lifestyle," she said, noting snowbirds relocate for extended periods of time and they're used to factoring health considerations into their decision-making.
Some snowbirds feel late government communication on travel during the pandemic has left them hanging, said Crooks, as stricter requirements come into force in days ahead for anyone arriving in Canada.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said this week that anyone arriving in Canada by land must present negative COVID-19 test results starting Monday. Those without the requisite test results could be fined up to $3,000.
Travellers arriving by air have been required to show the results of a molecular (PCR) test no more than three days old since last month.
4:45 a.m. Bureaucratic turf concerns prevented a highly trained team of infection prevention and control experts from helping Ontario long-term care homes in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, an independent commission has heard.
Dr. Gary Garber, the former medical director of infection prevention and control at Public Health Ontario, testified last week that his department was asked to maintain a low profile" in order to avoid being subsumed" by the newly created Ontario Health.
The reorganization, which the province said would modernize the health-care system and save millions of dollars, occurred on Jan. 22, 2020. The next day, a Toronto hospital admitted the first patient in Canada with the novel coronavirus.
In March, when a growing number of long-term care homes in the province were reporting COVID-19 outbreaks, Garber said 25 to 30 highly trained experts from Public Health Ontario watched from the sidelines.
At the time, I was explaining it to people that COVID really was the IPAC (infection prevention and control) Olympics, that we had people who had been training for years," Garber told the Long-Term Care COVID-19 Commission.
Instead, he said, the team was told not to get involved.
We were basically told, No, we don't have the bandwidth for that. No, we can't do that. No, it's...the health unit's responsibility to do that."
Public Health Ontario said in a statement to The Canadian Press that it did not prohibit its infection prevention specialists from going into nursing homes, but it noted that with a small team at PHO, it was not possible to meet every request."
The commission has heard about numerous failures in infection prevention and control in nursing homes in the pandemic's first wave, from not isolating sick residents from healthy ones to the lack, or misuse, of personal protective equipment.
Friday 4 a.m. Newfoundland and Labrador will be run by a caretaker government for at least two more weeks after a COVID-19 outbreak forced a delay in Saturday's provincial election in nearly half the province's ridings.
Liberal Leader and incumbent Premier Andrew Furey told reporters Thursday that his caretaker government, which by convention exercises limited powers, will remain in place until the election can be fully held.
Chief electoral officer Bruce Chaulk announced Thursday that with mounting COVID-19 cases in the St. John's region, in-person voting would be postponed across the Avalon Peninsula for at least two weeks.
With daily COVID-19 case counts nearly doubling every day this week, Chaulk warned that the voting delay could be longer than two weeks, and he urged voters to cast ballots by mail.
Furey said it's his understanding that all campaigning will cease on Saturday, even though polls will be open in just 22 of the province's 40 ridings.
Chaulk says those results will not be disclosed until voting has concluded everywhere in the province.
Thursday 3 p.m.: Just as Ontario is lifting stay-at-home orders, its latest computer modelling shows the U.K. coronavirus variant is a real threat," and will account for likely from five to 10 per cent of all cases. Experts caution that aggressive vaccinating and stay-at-home orders will help avoid a third wave," the Star's Rob Ferguson reports from a provincial press conference.
Ontario's COVID-19 case positivity rate is now 2.3 per cent, the lowest since mid-October, said chief medical officer Dr. David Williams.
But the new variants pose a real risk, he said.
Ontario cases of COVID-19 will likely be on the rise again in late February, with hospital ICUs getting more crowded about two weeks later, computer modellers forecast.
Ontario will reveal Friday which health units are moving back into the five-tier, colour-coded framework for lockdown, starting next Tuesday, said Williams. This could mean eased restrictions for some.
The experts say focusing vaccination efforts on long-term care homes has started to pay off, with a declining number of daily deaths in the facilities.
However, the number of deaths in nursing homes in the second wave of the pandemic has now drawn nearly even with the number of deaths in the facilities from the first wave.