Today’s coronavirus news: Ontario reporting 687 new cases; Unvaccinated travellers barred from planes and trains in Canada starting Tuesday
The latest coronavirus news from Canada and around the world Tuesday. This file will be updated throughout the day. Web links to longer stories if available.
11:15 a.m. Rob Chorley wanted two songs played at his funeral: Stand by Me" and You'll Never Walk Alone."
The 67-year-old wrote the request into a will he didn't think he'd need for a long time. He was retired, with years of golf, travel and grandchildren ahead. In February, he went to the Mississauga Hospital to have a benign tumour removed from his spine. The surgery went well, but a week later, the hospital called to say he was possibly exposed to COVID-19.
He tested positive, and his situation worsened. His family couldn't be with him when he died, and they couldn't sing those songs at his small funeral. Singing wasn't allowed.
Read the full story from the Star's Katie Daubs
11:03 a.m. With three deaths reported Tuesday, 10,000 Ontarians have now died with COVID-19, in a pandemic that stunned a generation and permanently altered lives. Nationwide, the toll is nearing 30,000. The coronavirus has exposed cracks in health-care systems, highlighted social inequities, and presented an unprecedented challenge for governments and ordinary people alike who faced an invisible enemy together, if often in isolation from those they loved.
As the province marks this awful milestone, many wonder: how will we remember the impact of this virus for generations to come? Will we want to remember?
Read the full story from the Star's Nadine Yousif and Katie Daubs
10:30 a.m. A rebel Russian monk who castigated the Kremlin and denied that the coronavirus existed was convicted Tuesday on accusations of encouraging suicides and given a 3 1/2-year prison sentence.
The monk, Father Sergiy, was arrested in December 2020 on charges of inciting suicidal actions through sermons in which he urged believers to die for Russia," breaching the freedom of conscience and making arbitrary moves. He rejected the accusations and his lawyers said they would appeal Tuesday's ruling by Moscow's Ismailovo District Court.
Father Sergiy reacted to the verdict with a biblical Do not judge and you will not be judged."
10:18 a.m. (will be updated) Ontario is reporting 687 new COVID-19 cases. Individuals who are not fully vaccinated represent 23.6 per cent of Ontario's total population and amount to 329 of Ontario's 687 new reported cases. 50 cases are in individuals with an unknown vaccination status, according to tweets from Health Minister Christine Elliott.
In Ontario, 22,978,037 vaccine doses have been administered. Nearly 89.9 per cent of Ontarians 12+ have one dose and nearly 86.4 per cent have two doses.
10:10 a.m. The little shop below 88 Erskine Ave., a towering condominium near Yonge and Eglinton, has all the makings of a typical Toronto convenience store. The shelves are filled with basic groceries and household items, refrigerated sodas and a generous supply of beef jerky.
What it's missing, though, are people. No clerks stocking the shelves, no cashier manning the till. Customers come and go, but the store is tucked away in a basement next to an underground parking lot, so foot traffic is light.
This is Aisle24, the fully automated brainchild of Toronto entrepreneur John Douang. The business began as a novelty concept in 2015, when Douang was enlisted by a developer to design a frictionless" bodega for students at Centennial College. It has since become a rapidly expanding franchise tailored to the current era of public health restrictions and shifts in the labour market.
Read the full story from the Star's Jacob Lorinc
10 a.m. A new report says droves of Canadian workers have experienced burnout during the pandemic and it's causing at least 20 per cent to seek new jobs.
The report from human resources software company Ceridian found 84 per cent of the 1,304 Canadian workers surveyed by Hanover Research last month felt burned out over the last two years.
The figures were extrapolated from a survey of 6,898 people working at companies with at least 100 employees across Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
9 a.m. Statistics Canada says the economy grew at an annual rate of 5.4 per cent in the third quarter of this year.
The result is a turnaround for an economy that shrank in the second quarter, and outpaced economists' expectations for growth in real gross domestic product between July and September. Statistics Canada says household spending rose in the quarter as restrictions eased, creating a greater demand for exports.
The quarter ended with the economy edging up by 0.1 per cent in September. The agency also says that preliminary data suggests the economy grew by 0.8 per cent in October to start the final quarter of the year. Statistics Canada says that with that estimate, total economic activity was about 0.5 per cent below the pre-pandemic level recorded in February 2020.
8:50 a.m. The president of a club enduring a COVID-19 outbreak is planning to sue the Portuguese league official who said his team wanted to play last weekend despite having only nine players.
Belenenses kicked off on Saturday and trailed Benfica 7-0 by halftime. The match was abandoned early in the second half after Belenenses went down to six players.
Health authorities later determined that 13 cases of the new omicron variant were detected within club members.
Benfica released a statement on Monday lamenting one of the saddest episodes in the history of Portuguese soccer."
8:15 a.m. The Team Toronto Kids COVID-19 vaccination plan has helped more than 10 per cent of five to 11-year-olds in Toronto receive their first dose in the first week that the COVID-19 vaccine for children was available in Canada," the city of Toronto said in a release on Tuesday.
More than 21,536 doses of vaccine for children aged five to 11 have now been administered in Toronto.
8:05 a.m. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Toronto, Lorraine Lam's life as an outreach worker supporting Toronto's homeless population felt increasingly lonely and distant.
She struggled to meet and connect with her clients due to social-distancing measures. Some were hard to track down because they didn't have phones. Others were difficult to meet during the winter, as most public spaces were closed. Her inability to help, especially as the colder months approached, left her tired and wary.
As people sheltered at home during lockdown, Lam became hyper-aware of not only the lack of resources and stark inequities facing her clients, but also how different her day-to-day was from people who worked from home, far from the pandemic front lines.
Read the full story from the Star's Nadine Yousif
7:52 a.m. In a pandemic that has illuminated how the lives of seniors, parents and children were upended by COVID-19, new research shows that young adults are among the Canadians most battered by the economic impact of the public health crisis.
According to survey results shared exclusively with the Star, the number of Canadians aged 18 to 24 who were neither working nor enrolled in education programs increased during the first nine months of the pandemic. Nineteen per cent of those aged 18 to 34 stopped or postponed their post-secondary studies - a finding that particularly affected Indigenous, Black and disabled young people.
Read the full story from the Star's Raisa Patel
6:50 a.m. The European Union's medical agency chief said Tuesday that it is ready to deal with the new Omicron variant, and that it will take two weeks to have an indication whether the current COVID-19 vaccines will be able to deal with it.
Emer Cooke, the Executive Director of the European Medicines Agency, said that if it does require a new vaccine to counter Omicron, it will take up to four months to have it approved for use in the 27-nation bloc.
We are prepared," Cooke told EU lawmakers, adding that cooperation with the medical industry is already ongoing to prepare for such an eventuality. We know that at some stage there will be a mutation that means we have to change the current approach."
Cooke sounded more reassuring than the World Health Organization, which warned Monday that the global risk from the omicron variant is very high," saying the mutated coronavirus could lead to surges with severe consequences."
6:37 a.m. (updated) The Omicron variant was already in the Netherlands when South Africa alerted the World Health Organization about it last week, Dutch health authorities said Tuesday, adding to fear and confusion over the new version of the coronavirus in a weary world hoping it had left the worst of the pandemic behind.
The Netherlands' RIVM health institute found omicron in samples dating from Nov. 19 and 23. The WHO said South Africa first reported the the variant to the U.N. healthy agency on Nov. 24.
It remains unclear where or when the variant first emerged - but that hasn't stopped wary nations from rushing to impose travel restrictions, especially on visitors coming from southern Africa. Those moves have been criticized by South Africa and the WHO has urged against them, noting their limited effect.
Much is still not known about the variant - though the WHO warned that the global risk from the variant is very high" and early evidence suggests it could be more contagious.
The Dutch announcement Tuesday further muddies the timeline on when the new variant actually emerged. Previously, the Dutch had said they found the variant among passengers who came from South Africa on Friday - but these new cases predate that.
Authorities in the eastern German city of Leipzig, meanwhile, said Tuesday they had confirmed an infection with the omicron variant in a 39-year-old man who had neither been abroad nor had contact with anyone who had been, news agency dpa reported. Leipzig is in the eastern state of Saxony, which currently has Germany's highest overall coronavirus infection rates.
6:11 a.m. A federal judge on Monday blocked President Joe Biden's administration from enforcing a coronavirus vaccine mandate on thousands of health care workers in 10 states that had brought the first legal challenge against the requirement.
The court order said that the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid had no clear authority from Congress to enact the vaccine mandate for providers participating in the two government health care programs for the elderly, disabled and poor.
The preliminary injunction by St. Louis-based U.S. District Judge Matthew Schelp applies to a coalition of suing states that includes Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming. All those states have either a Republican attorney general or governor. Similar lawsuits also are pending in other states.
5:55 a.m. The emergence of the new Omicron variant and the world's desperate and likely futile attempts to keep it at bay are reminders of what scientists have warned for months: The coronavirus will thrive as long as vast parts of the world lack vaccines.
The hoarding of limited COVID-19 shots by rich countries - creating virtual vaccine deserts in many poorer ones - doesn't just mean risk for the parts of the world seeing shortages; it threatens the entire globe.
That's because the more the disease spreads among unvaccinated populations, the more possibilities it has to mutate and potentially become more dangerous, prolonging the pandemic for everyone.
The virus is a ruthless opportunist, and the inequity that has characterized the global response has now come home to roost," said Dr. Richard Hatchett, CEO of CEPI, one of the groups behind the U.N.-backed COVAX shot-sharing initiative.
5:35 a.m. Canada's doctors say the COVID-19 pandemic took a staggering toll on the health of Canadians, including those who didn't contract it, with delayed surgeries and procedures costing thousands of lives and continuing to ravage people's health.
In a new report prepared by Deloitte for the Canadian Medical Association, researchers said it would cost at least $1.3 billion to end some of the most dangerous backlogs in key health services by June 2022 and return to pre-pandemic service levels.
The report said in one four-month period alone last year, the number of excess deaths" in Canada not related to COVID-19 infections was more than 4,000 for the period August to December 2020.
Read more from the Star's Tonda MacCharles.
5:10 a.m. Unvaccinated travellers over the age of 12 won't be able to board a plane or train in Canada beginning today, and a negative COVID-19 test will no longer serve as a substitute for most people.
The policy came into effect on Oct. 30, but the federal government allowed a short transition period for unvaccinated travellers who could board as long as they provided a negative molecular COVID-19 test taken within 72 hours before their trip.
The stringent new requirement comes into effect as Canada reacts to the emergence of the new, highly mutated Omicron variant of COVID-19.
The discovery of the new variant has prompted border closures and heavier screening in Canada and abroad over fears it could prove more transmissible.
Read more from The Canadian Press.
5 a.m. Food bank usage in Ontario rose 10 per cent during the first year of the pandemic to the highest levels since the recession, a new report has found.
Nearly 600,000 people made more than 3.6 million visits to food banks in Ontario between April 1, 2020 and March 31, 2021, according to an annual report from Feed Ontario, a collective of hunger-relief organizations in the province.
Siu Mee Cheng, the interim executive director of the group, said COVID-19 has exacerbated the income insecurity and affordability issues in the province.
"This is an extremely alarming trend," she said in an interview. "The pandemic has had an impact on individuals and families and, as a result, they are coming to the food banks."
The number of those who needed basic food support has increased by 10 per cent this year compared to the year before - the highest single-year rise since 2009, said the report.
4:40 a.m. Japan and France confirmed their first cases of the new variant of the coronavirus on Tuesday as countries around the world scrambled to close their doors or find ways to limit its spread while scientists study how damaging it might be.
The World Health Organization has warned that the global risk from the Omicron variant is very high" based on early evidence, saying it could lead to surges with severe consequences."
French authorities on Tuesday confirmed the first case of the Omicron variant in the French island territory of Reunion in the Indian Ocean. Patrick Mavingui, a microbiologist at the island's research clinic for infectious diseases, said the person who has tested positive for the new variant is a 53-year-old man who had traveled to Mozambique and stopped in South Africa before returning to Reunion.
The man was placed in quarantine. He has muscle pain and fatigue," Mavingui said, according to public television Reunion 1ere.
Japan on Tuesday confirmed its first case in a visitor who recently arrived from Namibia, a day after banning all foreign visitors as an emergency precaution against the variant. A government spokesperson said the patient, a man in his 30s, tested positive upon arrival at Narita airport on Sunday and was isolated and is being treated at a hospital.
WHO said there are considerable uncertainties" about the Omicron variant. But it said preliminary evidence raises the possibility that the variant has mutations that could help it both evade an immune-system response and boost its ability to spread from one person to another.
The WHO stressed that while scientists are hunting evidence to better understand this variant, countries should accelerate vaccinations as quickly as possible.
Despite the global worry, doctors in South Africa are reporting patients are suffering mostly mild symptoms so far. But they warn that it is early. Also, most of the new cases are in people in their 20s and 30s, who generally do not get as sick from COVID-19 as older patients.
4:25 a.m. Cambodia has barred entry to travelers from 10 African countries, citing the threat from the new Omicron coronavirus variant.
The move, announced in a Health Ministry statement issued late Monday, came just two weeks after Cambodia reopened its borders to fully vaccinated travelers.
The Health Ministry said the entry ban included anyone who has spent time in the previous three weeks in any of the 10 listed countries, including South Africa where the variant was first reported. Other countries include Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Angola and Zambia.