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.
8 a.m. U.K. government advisers could make a recommendation within days on whether the nation should roll out COVID-19 vaccines to young children.
Once the vaccines are cleared by the U.K. drugs regulator for use in 5-to-11-year-olds, the government’s vaccine advisory panel — the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation — will provide an opinion on whether they should be offered to that age group, JCVI Chair Wei Shen Lim told U.K. lawmakers Tuesday.
“We are discussing that at the moment,” he said at a parliamentary committee hearing on the coronavirus and the omicron variant. “We are also waiting for the vaccines to be approved by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.”
He added the group tries to “keep in step with the approval process” and expects to make a recommendation to the government before Christmas.
7:35 a.m. Poland’s Health ministry said Tuesday that a Polish teenager who flew from Warsaw to China last week is continental China’s first person to test positive for the omicron variant of COVID-19.
Ministry spokesman Wojciech Andrusiewicz said the teenager, who traveled with her mother, was hospitalized in isolation. She shows no symptoms of illness.
Andrusiewicz said she tested negative before leaving Warsaw Dec. 6, but a test after arrival in China showed infection with the omicron, which was confirmed by a second test, Dec.13.
According to China’s “Global Times” newspaper, the teenager is in Tianjin.
7:25 a.m. The African continent might not reach the target of vaccinating 70 per cent of its 1.3 billion population against COVID-19 until the second half of 2024, a target many of the world’s richer countries have already met, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.
The warning comes as the world faces a new surge in cases driven by the highly infectious Omicron variant. Health officials in South Africa, which first announced the variant, say early data indicate it causes less severe illness and shorter, less intensive hospital stays. But some richer countries have rushed to allow booster vaccine doses in response, even as less than 8 per cent of Africa’s population has received two doses.
“We will never get out of this if we don’t work together as one world,” Flavia Senkubuge, president of the Colleges of Medicine of South Africa, told reporters at the WHO briefing.
6:55 a.m. Pfizer said Tuesday that its experimental COVID-19 pill appears effective against the Omicron variant.
The company also said full results of its 2,250-person study confirmed the pill’s promising early results against the virus: The drug reduced combined hospitalizations and deaths by about 89% among high-risk adults when taken shortly after initial COVID-19 symptoms.
Separate laboratory testing shows the drug retains its potency against the omicron variant, the company announced, as many experts had predicted. Pfizer tested the antiviral drug against a man-made version of a key protein that omicron uses to reproduce itself.
The updates come as COVID-19 cases, deaths and hospitalization are all rising again and the U.S. hovers around 800,000 pandemic deaths. The latest surge, driven by the Delta variant, is accelerating due to colder weather and more indoor gatherings, even as health officials brace for the impact of the emerging Omicron mutant.
6:20 a.m. China has detected its second case of the Omicron variant in a 67-year-old man who tested positive after more than two weeks of quarantine, official media reported Tuesday.
State broadcaster CCTV said the man returned from overseas on Nov. 27 and underwent two weeks of isolation, during which he repeatedly tested negative for the virus.
On Saturday, he flew to the southern city of Guangzhou where he maintains a residence and began another week of self-quarantining at home.
A day later he underwent a routine test and early on Monday, the district health department informed authorities he had tested positive for the virus, the station reported.
6:15 a.m.: A two-dose Pfizer/BioNTech vaccination provides just 33% protection against infection by the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, but 70% protection against hospitalization, according to a large-scale analysis in South Africa released Tuesday.
The first large-scale analysis of vaccine effectiveness in the region where the new variant was discovered appears to support early indications that Omicron is more easily transmissible and that the Pfizer shot isn’t as effective in protecting against infection as it was against the Delta variant.
The analysis was based on more than 211,000 positive COVID-19 test results, 41% from adults who had received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine. About 78,000 of these positive COVID-19 test results between Nov. 15 and Dec. 7 were attributed to Omicron infections. The study was carried out by Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest private health insurer, and the South African Medical Research Council.
5:30 a.m. The federal fiscal update contains more than $1.5 billion to buy rapid tests right away, the Star has learned.
The money will go toward buying the tests directly and also helping provinces with the logistics of distributing them, a federal source said on condition of anonymity.
It’s one of the few new spending items that will be included in Tuesday’s fiscal update, which will focus mainly on bringing the books up to date after last spring’s budget.
The goal is to respond to growing requests from provinces to make more use of rapid tests to quickly detect the new Omicron variant, which is highly contagious.
Read the exclusive report from the Star’s Heather Scoffield.
5:15 a.m. Two out of three ain’t bad — unless your office has a mandatory COVID vaccine policy.
As the COVID vaccine booster rollout widens, labour law experts say workplace mandates will eventually include a third shot.
“Once the boosters become widely available, every company which has a vaccine mandate will add the booster,” said Howard Levitt, senior partner at Levitt Sheikh LLP, a law firm specializing in labour and employment law.
On Monday, Ontario began accepting bookings for COVID booster shots for anyone 50 and over who got their second shot at least 168 days earlier. In early January, bookings will be extended to include people 18 and over. The widening availability of booster shots come as Ontario faces rapidly-rising COVID case counts, and a growing threat from the Omicron variant.
Read more from the Star’s Josh Rubin.
5:05 a.m. Sara Fung was overcome with emotion when the first COVID-19 vaccines started pouring into Canada last December, and again in March when she received her first dose.
As she felt the prick of the needle on her arm, the Hamilton-area nurse thought of the grandmother she lost to COVID-19 nearly a year earlier.
Pandemic restrictions kept Fung from properly grieving her grandmother’s death when the “glue of the family” died in a Toronto long-term care home in April 2020. Although the matriarch was 100 years old, Fung says she was healthy and lively, and likely to survive another couple of years.
“I remember feeling so fortunate (when getting the vaccine). Really, it was a tribute to my grandmother,” Fung said, pausing to hold back tears during a virtual interview. “I was thinking: ‘if this had been available to her, I have no doubt she’d still be alive today.'”
Tuesday marks the one-year anniversary of the first COVID-19 vaccines administered in Canada, a milestone that offered hope for a new year after a dismal 2020.
Read more from The Canadian Press.
5 a.m. As Ontario braces for a tidal wave of Omicron cases, the Kingston area is already struggling to contain the new variant of concern that has flamed through the city, forcing the region to enact new public health restrictions now among the toughest in the province.
On Monday, Kingston, Frontenac and Lennox & Addington Public Health restricted gatherings to just five people for the next week to curb the spread of COVID-19 as the region’s hospitals — now caring for the highest number of coronavirus patients in Ontario — warned of limited capacity.
Cases of the Omicron variant in the region — with among the lowest case counts in the first three waves of the pandemic, and a high proportion of its population vaccinated — are soaring in young adults, pushing up already-high infection rates from a Delta-fuelled fourth wave that rolled in last month.
Read more from the Star’s Megan Ogilvie and May Warren.
4:45 a.m. Ontario will unveil new restrictions to protect nursing home residents from COVID-19 and is working to begin offering boosters for those 18 and over sooner than Jan. 4 as the Omicron variant spreads more rapidly than predicted just days ago.
The measures coming Tuesday include requiring all nursing home visitors be vaccinated and setting a limit of two visitors, government sources said.
“Visitors need to be at least double vaccinated because seniors are more vulnerable,” said Lisa Levin of AdvantAge Ontario, representing not-for-profit homes.
“Things have changed.”
Homes have been testing visitors but that is not enough, Levin said, raising concerns about how many nursing home workers have boosters and what could happen to care levels for frail and elderly residents if too many staff contract the virus.
Read more from Rob Ferguson.
4:30 a.m. A person who was on Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s flightback from the United Arab Emirates has tested positive for COVID-19, the prime minister’s office said Tuesday.
Bennett returned to Israel on Monday from a historic two-day trip to the Gulf Arab state, the first by an Israeli leader to the country, which recently normalized ties with Israel.
He was in a three-day quarantine on Tuesday as per Health Ministry regulations, which require all returning travelers, even those vaccinated, to self-isolate. He was expected to take a coronavirus test on Wednesday, also in line with health regulations, and then end his quarantine if he tests negative, the prime minister’s office said.
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