The latest on the coronavirus outbreak for Feb. 11

• Trudeau, Ford offer strongest words of condemnation yet, but weekend of unrest, protest appears to be on tap.
• Federal health minister says Omicron wave no longer swelling, but ‘living with the virus’ desirable only with decreased hospital strain, death totals.
• Sweeping recommendations for Canadian long-term care industry released for federal, provincial officials to consider.
• Still much to learn about Pfizer-BioNTech trial data in under-5 vaccine as FDA postpones meeting next week.
• Explore: Ottawa may be close to scrapping pre-arrival COVID test requirement for fully vaccinated…. Manitoba to drop capacity limits next week, as justice minister criticizes Trudeau for ‘unnecessarily divisive’ approach to vaccination message…. How to up your rapid test game.

Trudeau warns protesters of consequences, Ontario declares state of emergency to enhance enforcement powers 

Ontario Premier Doug Ford on Friday said the province is declaring a state of emergency in response to convoy protests against public health measures meant to curb the spread of COVID-19, which have caused major disruptions in multiple areas of the province in recent days.

At a news conference Friday, Ford said he will convene cabinet and “urgently enact orders that will make crystal clear it is illegal and punishable to block and impede the movement of goods, people and services along critical infrastructure.”

“This will include protecting international border crossings, 400-series highways, airports, ports, bridges and railways,” Ford said.

The most significant demonstration in terms of economic impact is taking place in Windsor, Ont., where protesters have blocked traffic at the Ambassador Bridge connecting to Michigan. The protest has seen production curtailed at the auto industry giants with a heavy presence in both that U.S. state and the province, and undoubtedly has impacted a whole host of other industries, given the estimated $400 million worth of commercial goods flowing in both directions every day.

Protesters began to slowly move vehicles out of one of the exiting lanes ahead of Ford’s announcement and before an Ontario court was preparing to hear an application for an injunction, ultimately granted, that had been put forward by auto-industry leaders and backed by the City of Windsor. But the blockage overall remains.

It was previously reported that the U.S. offered the Canadian government unspecified help to end the blockades, which have also occurred near border points in southern Alberta and Manitoba. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Joe Biden spoke on Friday about the issue, with the White House saying Trudeau promised “quick action in enforcing the law.”

It is an open question whether Trudeau’s comments a little later to reporters and the Canadian public would leave officials in the Biden administration satisfied.

Trudeau said protesters were playing with fire in the form of potential criminal offences, fines and commercial vehicle licence suspensions, but stressed, “we do not direct the local police, even when they’re in proximity to an international border crossing.”

He said the RCMP is on the ground at the hotspots and is supporting local and provincial police forces who are engaged in the various protests.

“But we are a long away from ever having to call in the military, although of course we have to be ready for any eventuality,” he said.

The longest-running protest is in Ottawa, where the police and residents are bracing for a heightened presence for a third consecutive weekend.

While Ottawa police said negotiators managed to convince the drivers of 25 trucks to leave the city on Thursday after their latest warning, 400 trucks remain illegally parked on streets in the core.

The protests putatively began with opposition to a vaccine mandate in the trucking industry — although the Canadian Trucking Alliance and Teamsters have condemned the actions — and have expanded into a more amorphous group of individuals whose objections range from mandates to any COVID-19 restrictions as the pandemic hits a third year.

Jack Rozdilsky, an associate professor of disaster and emergency management at York University in Toronto, said there are still ways to obtain a peaceful end to the crisis, although some analysts say time is precious right now.

“There’s going to be a number of bad choices that authorities can make to end it,” said Rozdilsky. “What they’re going to have to do is make a choice that will be the best of the worst choices.”

From CBC News

‘Unpleasant surprises’ may still arise with fewer COVID-19 restrictions: Duclos

Federal Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos and Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam said during a news briefing on Friday that the worst of the latest wave of the pandemic appears now behind in Canada.

Cases are falling in all jurisdictions, Tam said, although the current average of 11,000 new cases per day is an incomplete tally as many jurisdictions have restricted tests to high-risk individuals.

There are 130 people dying of COVID-19 daily on average in the past seven days, the officials said. About 8,700 are being treated for the virus in hospital each day and 1,000 are receiving intensive care, the latest data from the Public Health Agency of Canada shows.

While still high, those figures show that Canada is past the peak of the Omicron wave and provinces can begin to ease COVID-19 restrictions, Tam said.

Provinces must also plan for the future, because the virus will not go away and more variants might emerge with uncertain transmission and severity, she said. Those plans should include testing, public health measures, vaccines and treatments, she said. Families should also be empowered with tools to make their own decisions based on their own risk tolerance, and reduce their risk using personal protective measures like masks, physical distancing and vaccination, she said.

“Though resurgence is still possible, especially as public health measures ease, increasing availability and rapid application of these tools can help to lessen the impact on hospitals.”

Several provinces, including Manitoba on Friday, have announced a planned relaxation of some protective measures this week. Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan have announced intentions to let indoor mask mandates lapse over the next four weeks, although some municipalities in those provinces have signalled they may keep mandates for a while longer in certain indoor settings.

Duclos, acknowledging that jurisdictions in Canada and around the world are plotting a way to “live with the virus,” laid out a multi-point presentation as to what he believes that means.

It includes, he said, a sizable decrease in the “large numbers” of people still dying of COVID-19 every day and that the virus can circulate in society without health-care systems being “paralyzed.”

Duclos said provinces should be prepared that future virus variants providing “unpleasant surprises” over the coming months.

Standards group calls for sweeping post-pandemic changes to how long-term care homes operate

The Canadian Standards Association is calling for profound changes, in draft recommendations released Friday, in the way Canada’s long-term care facilities are run after the pandemic exposed serious weaknesses that contributed to thousands of deaths across the country.

The CSA draft standards released today are part of a larger package of standards requested by the federal government in spring 2021. Among other things, the CSA is calling for single rooms with private bathrooms for long-term care residents and better contingency plans for staffing shortages when “catastrophic” events occur.

The draft standards are comprehensive and include detailed infection control measures covering such things as PPE supplies, laundry and waste management and rules for cleaning a room after an outbreak or death. They also cover aspects of day-to-day functions — such as helping residents eat, bathe and go outside — and visitation policies. They include a section on staff training and education as well.

The CSA is proposing different standards depending on whether a facility is an existing structure or a new build. For example, it calls on existing long-term care homes with rooms housing multiple residents to convert them into rooms that would accommodate two residents at most.

Alex Mihailidis, chair of the technical subcommittee that developed the draft standards, said the advisory group that came up with the standards included long-term care residents and family members of residents.

“The hope here is that they all now have skin in the game.… The hope is that they will lead the charge to see change from within.”

According to the National Institute on Ageing’s latest numbers, more than 16,000 residents of long-term care homes in Canada have died because of COVID-19. Thousands of staff members in long-term care facilities have been infected as well, and more than two dozen of them have died as a result.

Ontario and Quebec as a result have taken sweeping looks into the industry as a whole through inquiries, while other provinces have probed outbreaks at specific facilities.

The federal government has promised a new long-term care act that it insists will respect provincial jurisdiction over the long-term care sector. It’s not clear whether provinces would be compelled to adopt and enforce the standards in that law or whether they’d have the option of drafting their own revised standards.

“You can’t meet a standard if you don’t have the money,” Michele Lowe, executive director for the Nursing Homes of Nova Scotia Association, told CBC News before the draft standards were made public. “There’s been this narrative that long-term care facilities and operators should have done better and they chose not to do better. But the reality in many of these cases is they didn’t receive the funding from the Department of Health in those provinces.”

The federal government has not laid out a timeline as to when any legislation concerning the industry would be tabled.

Read the full story

What we know about COVID-19 vaccines for kids younger than 5

It’s still unknown when a COVID-19 vaccine could be offered to children younger than five, as drug manufacturers have yet to apply to Health Canada to provide a vaccine for this age group.

So far, Pfizer has not yet made all of its trial data public.

The drug manufacturer said in December that preliminary study results showed that two low doses of its mRNA vaccine promoted a strong immune response in children between the ages of six months and two years old. But two doses were less effective at preventing COVID-19 in two-to-five-year-olds.

Dr. Cora Constantinescu, a pediatrician and infectious diseases physician in Calgary, told CBC’s The Dose there are two possible reasons why the vaccine was less effective for older children during the trial: The 21-day interval might not have been long enough for an immune system response, and the immunological age of kids who are two to five years old could have played a role.

“In a person’s life, their immune system is at different stages,” Constantinescu said. “It just takes a bit longer to train the immune system to respond appropriately to an antigen, and it’s conceivable that might also weigh in.”

Other routine vaccines given to kids at this age often include three or four vaccines, she added.

The drugmaker added a third shot to the study, but results are not expected until late March. Despite that, the Food and Drug Administration took the highly unusual step of urging Pfizer to apply now for a two-dose series, with a third shot potentially added later.

“I think there’s a lot of pressure on Pfizer to submit to the FDA because there’s a lot of concern about the number of children that are being hospitalized in the U.S. with COVID — and some of them with fairly serious disease,” said Dr. Noni MacDonald, a pediatric vaccinologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

From mid-December until Jan. 7, the hospitalization rate in the youngest kids in the U.S. had surged to more than four in 100,000 children, up from 2.5 per 100,000.

As of Feb. 4, the number of kids up to age 11 hospitalized with COVID-19 accounted for 1.8 per cent of the 122,074 total hospitalizations in Canada. (Canada does not provide specific data for the age group up to five years old.)

It was hoped more clarity would be offered next week but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced on Friday that the Feb. 15 advisory committee meeting concerning the COVID-19 vaccine for children younger than five was being postponed to provide more time to review data.

Given the concerns parents have about their youngest children, uptake is an open question if and when a vaccine gets approved for the cohort. Health Canada tracking shows 55.5 per cent of kids ages five to 11 have received a single dose of vaccine since the late November approval, with 22.7 per cent fully vaccinated. Those figures are better than, or comparable with, most Western countries — in the U.S., where approval of the vaccine came about a month earlier, 31.5 per cent of kids five to 11 had received one dose, with 23.5 per cent fully vaccinated.

Read the full story

COVID-19 trends in the United States   

Deaths are at near-peak levels in the Omicron wave, while hospitalizations have dipped somewhat but remain high

Find out more about COVID-19

For full coverage of how your province or territory is responding to COVID-19, visit your local CBC News site.

To get this newsletter daily as an email, subscribe here.

See the answers to COVID-19 questions asked by CBC viewers and readers.

Still looking for more information on the pandemic? Reach out to us at covid@cbc.ca if you have any questions.