Today’s coronavirus news: Major events returning to Toronto; Ontario reporting 821 people hospitalized with COVID-19
The latest coronavirus news from Canada and around the world Friday. This file will be updated throughout the day. Web links to longer stories if available.
2:22 p.m. This time, it feels different.
Although Toronto concert venues - and clubs especially - were allowed 100 per cent capacity for six weeks in late 2021 before the Omicron surge hit, the lifting of restrictions feels like it's more final than in other incarnations.
Shaun Bowring, owner of Toronto clubs The Garrison (capacity 350) and The Baby G (capacity 150), agreed.
It seems in general that public health guidance and governments are at the point where they're saying, OK, we're living with this and we're hopefully headed into an endemic.' That seems to be something that's happening globally, not just locally or provincially."
Whether this is a move by the Ontario government that's borne out of COVID fatigue, public interest, mental health or a combination of all those factors, Bowring, who is happy that his clubs are back at full capacity, wishes they would have been given a little more notice.
12:56 p.m. Four athletes set to compete at the Tim Hortons Brier have yet to make the trip to Lethbridge, Alta., after testing positive for COVID-19 on their pre-departure PCR tests, Curling Canada said Friday in a statement.
Each competitor plays on a different team, the federation said, without identifying any of the athletes. The players remain in isolation in their respective hometowns.
Round-robin play was scheduled to begin Friday night at the Enmax Centre. Competition continues through March 13.
12:21 p.m. U.S. businesses stepped up their hiring last month as the Omicron faded and more Americans ventured out to spend at restaurants, shops, and hotels despite surging inflation.
Employers added 678,000 jobs in February, the largest monthly total since July, the Labor Department reported Friday. The unemployment rate dropped to 3.8%, from 4% in January, extending a sharp decline in joblessness to its lowest level since before the pandemic erupted two years ago.
Friday's hiring figures were collected before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which has sent oil prices jumping and has heightened risks and uncertainties for economies in Europe and the rest of the world.
Yet the February hiring data suggest that two years after COVID-19 sparked a nationwide shutdown and 22 million job losses, the disease is losing its grip on America's economy. More people are taking jobs or searching for work - a trend that, if it endures, will help ease the labor shortages that have bedeviled employers for the past year.
12:04 p.m. New York City will lift mandates next week requiring masks in public schools and proof of vaccination to dine in restaurants or enter entertainment, sports and cultural venues, Mayor Eric Adams announced Friday.
Standing in Times Square, Adams said that while the COVID-19 pandemic isn't over, he was confident that it is now safe to send children to school unmasked.
We want to see the faces of our children. We want to see their smiles," the mayor said, adding that parents could continue to send their kids to school with face coverings if they wished.
The mayor, a Democrat, last weekend said he would lift the mandates if infections and hospitalizations continued a downward trend. He stressed that the mandates could be re-imposed if a new variant emerges that, like Omicron, poses a special danger.
11:52 a.m. Quebec is reporting 16 more deaths due to COVID-19 and a 51-patient drop in the number of people hospitalized with the disease.
There are 1,313 people in hospital with COVID-19, after 88 people were admitted in the past 24 hours and 139 people were discharged.
The number of people in intensive care rose by four, to 80.
Health officials are reporting another 1,354 COVID-19 infections detected through PCR testing, which is restricted to certain groups.
11:30 a.m. Canada's Laurent Dubreuil has tested positive for COVID-19 at the world speedskating championships, sinking his chance at claiming the men's sprint title.
Speed Skating Canada released a statement from Dubreuil confirming the positive test shortly before Friday's races were set to begin.
Dubreuil sat first in the men's overall sprint standings following Thursday's races after winning the first 500-metre sprint and finishing third in the first 1,000-metre race.
Sprint champions are decided after two races over 500 metres and two over 1,000. The final sprint races were all scheduled to take place Friday.
10:17 a.m. (updated) Ontario is reporting 262 people in ICU due to COVID-19 and 821 in hospital overall testing positive for COVID-19, according to its latest report released Friday morning.
Of the people hospitalized, 44 per cent were admitted for COVID-19 and 56 per cent were admitted for other reasons but have since tested positive. For the ICU numbers, 80 per cent were admitted for COVID-19 and 20 per cent were admitted for other reasons but have since tested positive.
Given new provincial regulations around testing that took effect Dec. 31, 2021, case counts - reported at 2,085 on Friday, down eight per cent from the previous day - are also not considered an accurate assessment of how widespread COVID-19 is right now; 28 virus-related new deaths were reported in the latest numbers.
Read more from the Star's Erin LeBlanc.
9:13 a.m. (updated) The City of Toronto has announced that major events will proceed immediately - meaning Pride, the Toronto International Film Festival and other in-person celebrations will be permitted for the first time in two years.
Mayor John Tory made the announcement at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on Friday morning, signalling the next phase of re-opening in the city almost 24 months since the provincial government first declared an emergency over COVID-19.
Read more from the Star's Jennifer Pagliaro.
8:28 a.m. (updated): Premier Doug Ford is losing another key member of his cabinet as Health Minister Christine Elliott - also his deputy premier - says she won't run in the June 2 provincial election.
Elliott confirmed her pending retirement in a statement Friday morning, following news reports Thursday night.
After considerable reflection and discussion with my family, it is with deep gratitude for my 16 years in public life that I recently shared with Premier Ford I will not be seeking re-election in the upcoming provincial contest in June," she wrote.
Between now and this spring, Premier Ford has asked me to continue to support our government as minister of health and I have agreed without hesitation."
Read more from the Star's Rob Ferguson.
7:50 a.m. Toronto Mayor John Tory is set to make an announcement about Toronto's festivals and in-person events at 9 a.m. on Friday.
7:35 a.m. March 1 marked a big day in Ontario, with proof of vaccination no longer required for workplaces, and capacity limits for indoor public settings being lifted.
With restrictions slowly being lifted, many workers are wondering what masking policies they will face as they slowly return to in-person work at the office.
The government of Ontario requires that people wear masks in the workplace if they are unable to stay at least two metres apart. In a common space, boardroom meeting, lunch room, people can be unmasked only if they're a safe distance from one another.
Read the full story from the Star's Clarrie Feinstein
7:10 a.m. Toronto high school student Evan Woo is done" with wearing masks in class.
Not only does he miss seeing his friends' faces - and would love to know what some teachers look like beneath the nose - but he says masks are a barrier" to learning because voices are muffled.
Sometimes it's hard to hear someone speaking two desks down from where I'm sitting," said the Grade 12 student at Earl Haig Second, ary School.
Read the full story from the Stars's Isabel Teotonio
5:45 a.m.: Long-standing inequities in education, housing and employment in Nova Scotia's Black communities have been amplified by COVID-19, according to community leaders who are trying to collect better race-based data on the pandemic.
Those same issues have left African Nova Scotians vulnerable to misinformation about the disease, said David Haase, with the Health Association of African Nova Scotians, or HAAC.
When COVID came along, we recognized that there was misinformation, mainly on social media, that the community was seeing and absorbing," Haase said during a recent interview. Things like, Black people are not as easily infected,' which is the opposite to the reality, we realized."
The last two years have been particularly difficult for the province's Black community, many of whom are descendants of American Loyalists who arrived in Nova Scotia in the 1780s, as a result of the American Revolution.
John Ariyo, director of equality and engagement with the province, said in an interview last week, COVID has actually uncovered ... some of the inequalities in our communities when it comes to Black residents."
Friday 5:42 a.m.: The markets are crowded again. Traffic is jamming the roads. Migrant workers have returned to the cities. And young people are back at schools and universities - many of them for the first time in years.
It isn't quite how things were before the COVID-19 pandemic - mask mandates still exist in some places - but with infections steadily declining, life in South Asia is returning to a sense of normalcy.
The mental scars from last year's delta-driven surge persist - especially in India, where health systems collapsed and millions likely died - but across the region high vaccination rates and hope that the highly contagious Omicron variant has helped bolster immunity are giving people reasons to be optimistic.
While experts agree that opening up was the right move amid falling case numbers, they caution that optimism should be tempered with lessons from the past two years.