Month: April 2022

Posted on

Jazz steal Game 1 from Dallas

Jazz steal Game 1 from Dallas

Posted on

A key issue for COVID-19 vaccines

A key issue for COVID-19 vaccines

One of the greatest success stories of the pandemic has been the development of mRNA vaccines. However, 2 years into the pandemic, many people’s immune systems are no longer naive to the virus, which has led to questions about how vaccines could and should evolve in the future.

masked person pulling trollerShare on Pinterest
What is ‘immune imprinting,’ and what does it mean for the future of COVID-19 vaccines? Image credit: Paul Yeung/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

When AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Moderna started to recruit participants for their first COVID-19 vaccine trials in the spring and summer of 2020, they had to find people who did not think they had previously been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Pharmaceutical companies took this measure for a number of reasons — for example, the world had little idea how much previous infection with SARS-CoV-2 might protect against future infections.

Without this information, it was difficult to evaluate how much of the protection discovered in the trial was due to the vaccine or to previous exposure to the virus. This presented some challenges.

In fact, in areas heavily impacted by the virus in the first wave, the requirement to recruit participants with no previous infection was met with some initial reactions of disbelief.

Community testing had not been in place for months in many places, some people would have had asymptomatic infections, and it is also likely people had COVID-19 before they understood it was circulating in their region.

And of course, no trial participants had, in the beginning, received any other form of COVID-19 vaccine as they did not yet exist.

Research has since shown that previous SARS-CoV-2 infection alongside vaccination offers the strongest protection against future infection, that mixing and matching vaccines works, and that immunity from COVID-19 wanes with time.

Our understanding of the virus has improved. We know how it spreads, how to protect against it, and how to treat the disease it causes. Yet, at the same time that this body of knowledge has grown, our actual bodies have changed in how they might respond to a SARS-CoV-2 infection.

While in November 2019, very few people in the world had been exposed to SARS-CoV-2, today, over 11 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered, and about 500 million people are likely to have had COVID-19.

Of those individuals, some will have contracted the original Alpha variant of the virus, some Delta, some Omicron, and some may have had several infections with more than one variant.

Considering that, on top of that, many people will have been vaccinated with different types of vaccines and different combinations of vaccines, the ways in which our immune systems may have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 markers are myriad.

While many of us will be able to stage an immune response to SARS-CoV-2 that we would not have been able to 2 years or even 1 year ago, the individual response may vary considerably between people, depending on the nature of previous exposure.

This phenomenon is known as immune imprinting, Prof. Danny Altmann, professor of immunology at Imperial College London explained to Medical News Today in an interview:

“All those things push and pull your immune repertoire, your antibodies and things in different directions, and make you respond differently to the next vaccine that comes along […] So that’s what’s called immune imprinting.”

Along with colleagues at Imperial College London and St Mary’s University, London, United Kingdom, he carried out a detailed, longitudinal study of a cohort of 731 healthcare professionals.

Their individual immune responses were measured after vaccination with the Pfizer vaccine, and stratified according to who had been previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and those who had not, and which strain they were likely to have had depending on when they contracted the virus.

The results appeared in the journal Science in December 2021, and they outline how the exact spike protein an individual is exposed to during infection or vaccination affects that individual’s ability to stage an immune response to other spike proteins.

Since then, research by other teams has confirmed their findings.

“Some people want to be very exotic and sort of biblical about it, call it ‘original antigenic sin,’ you know, the idea that […] your immune system is born with some sin on board already, and you can’t go change it back to a blank sheet. So that’s not the kind of academic nuance, that’s a real thing and a big thing,” Prof. Altmann said.

So how are the pharmaceutical companies factoring these different responses into their vaccine trials?

First of all, Janssen (Johnson & Johnson), which held its first vaccine trials months after the other pharmaceutical companies, allowed people who had previous infection with SARS-CoV-2 into their trials, outlined in its results. Instead, they excluded people who had received other vaccinations.

Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca are holding current vaccine trials with their existing vaccines. A spokesperson for Pfizer told MNT:

“In our ongoing studies of COVID-19 vaccines we include both vaccinated and previously unvaccinated participants. Additionally, in our landmark phase 3 study we had seropositive and seronegative participants. So to summarize, people who have previous vaccination/ infection are included in our current trials.”

AstraZeneca responded similarly, with Fiona Cookson, director of global media relations telling MNT: “We do take into account previous infection in our studies as part of the stratification process.”

The use of original vaccines based on the original variant was still valid, said Prof. Monica Gandhi, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and medical director of the UCSF Center for AIDS research.

This was because attempts to develop variant-specific vaccines showed that it was not possible to develop them quickly enough to be of use in each wave.

She told MNT: “This study [in Science] shows that the well-described phenomenon of a breakthrough infection enhancing vaccine responses is less effective if the infection involves a variant of concern since the variant has a different (heterologous) spike protein — with mutations that distinguish it from the ancestral state — than that encoded by the vaccine.”

“Clinically, this likely means that there is no reason to develop variant-specific boosters since they may not be more effective against a variant in the future and that we can likely stick with the original booster — with the Wuhan-Hu-1 sequence — for now,” she added.

While the original vaccines are still effective, the finding also raises questions about whether mRNA vaccines, which were designed to make the body launch an immune response to the original spike protein, would have been better designed to help the body stage a response against a different, less frequently mutating part of the viral RNA.

Originally, researchers had hoped that designing mRNA vaccines to help our bodies recognize the spike protein would mean variants would not matter, as they assumed that variants that featured mutations on the spike protein that were not recognized by existing antigens would be less virulent.

Since these vaccines were first designed we have learned more about the virus and why some of these assumptions were incorrect. For example, the virus mutates more rapidly than previously assumed.

Prof. Altmann suggested that researchers could use this knowledge to develop new vaccines in the future, which target the parts of the virus genome that do not mutate, or at least do not do it as rapidly:

“We’re intelligent people, we know the structure of the spike and which bits are conserved and which bits are different. So surely, you know where on the virus we can hone in on for a vaccine. That’s against the bits that it can’t mutate.”

We are already seeing mRNA vaccine technology harnessed to target other viruses, such as HIV, and even experimental vaccines against cancer.

The development of a next generation of mRNA vaccines that target non-mutating parts of the virus genome could help us tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and lay the path for innovative vaccines that take on board our growing understanding of genomics and our immune systems.

Posted on

Can Fashion Designers Really Learn to Be Sustainable?

Can Fashion Designers Really Learn to Be Sustainable?

Photograph-Illustration: The Cut Image: Natasha Mays

In latest yrs, sustainability has turn into an progressively ubiquitous buzzword in the style field. Customers say they want to be ethical consumers, getting vintage and upcycling on Depop. Reformation phone calls by itself the most sustainable solution other than staying bare, while Eileen Fisher has pledged to use “sustainable materials” in 100 {cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809} of its solutions. But what sustainability really signifies in this context has grow to be progressively nebulous. H&M released a 2019 Conscious assortment that was anything but ecoconscious ASOS marketed nonrecyclable trousers as 100 p.c recyclable and Uniqlo appointed a cartoon cat as its world sustainability ambassador even though depriving Vietnamese garment employees tens of millions in severance pay. Ecoconscious internet marketing only goes so much in an business accountable for 10 percent of world wide carbon emissions, immediate deforestation, and 60 million tons of plastic waste per year — which include microplastics that get launched into the ocean and environment every time we put on or clean polyester. Not to point out the industry’s human price: Per the Cleanse Dresses Marketing campaign, only about 2 p.c of the world’s 60 million garment employees receive a residing wage.

This pressure is front of head for the subsequent generation of vogue learners. Nina Alhadeff, a Barnard Faculty senior who serves as an adviser to the Columbia Undergraduate Manner Culture, says that a good deal of her friends are interested in pursuing “sustainability related” paths: “Not a great deal of people today are expressing, I want to go get the job done for Dior since I appreciate Dior. It is: I want to be portion of their ESG” — referring to the governance boards that uphold a corporation’s ethical criteria, like air pollution prevention and labor legal rights.

Most traditional trend systems now provide sustainability courses but tactic the subject matter inside of silos — college students acquire biology and wide offerings on “ecology and environmental challenges” — though concerns of neocolonialism and human legal rights go unexplored. The Gradual Manufacturing unit (named as a counterargument to, say, fast manner) is a Brooklyn-centered faculty that thinks students cannot minimize harm without finding out the whole context of the hurt the business has induced: “We tackle the impacts of colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy on the earth, and how these devices had been developed to extract and exploit methods and labor,” states activist and designer Celine Semaan, who launched the virtual, non-degree school as a way of offering free sustainable trend education to any individual, irrespective of tutorial qualifications. The college at this time enrolls 28,000 college students, from Gen-Z manner pupils to boomer scientists, and its syllabus gives every little thing from extra conventional matters like ecological literacy to unlearning Euro-centric magnificence criteria and racism in speedy manner. “An open education and learning is what they won’t educate you in college,” claims Semaan. “In real lifestyle, you just can’t omit human existence when you are conversing about local climate justice. It’s not how our ecosystem is effective.” In the course of sustainability literacy classes, college students change their contemplating away from linear, Western methods — wherever a garment is designed in a sweatshop, worn in the West, and later on donated, only to get hauled off to a International South landfill — to regenerative loops, the place squander is recycled back into the earth. Gradual Factory pupils get personal with recycling squander by touring landfills and are encouraged to contemplate the stop of a product’s daily life just before the starting.

Numerous pupils say they gravitated to the Gradual Manufacturing facility for the reason that they were skeptical or alienated by present sustainability initiatives in the market, which typically felt like greenwashing — organizations advertising on their own as a lot more ecofriendly than they are — and cultural erasure. “White supremacy and capitalism paint this picture of white folks getting at the front of sustainability, when they’re just commencing to apply what has presently been handed down for generations,” suggests designer Sayo Watanbe. There is also the challenge of accessibility. Since ecofriendly elements are commonly far more highly-priced to manufacture, outfits promoted as sustainable are typically luxuries for a privileged couple of — for occasion, a camisole at Reformation expenses $128, while a sweater by sustainable designer Gabriela Hearst is just about $2,000. “As a Black woman and solitary guardian on govt gains, I’m not the goal marketplace for brands making certainly sustainable manner. I preferred to locate my tribe,” says Natasha Mays, a previous London School of Style college student who now requires courses at Gradual Manufacturing unit. For the school’s Squander-Led Layout challenge, Mays produced trench coats out of competition tents bound for U.K. landfills, turning them into jacket shells that she stuffed with shredded aged baby dresses. Charlotte Bohning and Mary Lempres, industrial style pupils at Pratt, created biodegradable charcoal nipple pasties (the Wastie Pastie) out of food stuff waste that you can compost immediately after wearing. And Watanbe re-covered food shipping and delivery mailers to make purses.

Nevertheless, fantastic intentions only go so considerably. Recycled product is not necessarily biodegradable or compostable, and some industry experts counsel fashion organizations have to have to go further more than just using recycled products to definitely reduce textile-mill emissions, which account for 76 per cent of a garment’s carbon footprint. It’s also difficult to scale slow manner if you don’t have the brand hoopla of ecogiants like Reformation (which continue to doesn’t pay back 100 percent of its personnel a dwelling wage) or Everlane. To essentially get sustainable solutions down to competitive price tag factors usually takes time, and there’s often a rub: You can review ecojustice, but you are nevertheless functioning in a field the place human rights violations are ubiquitous as Shein crop tops.

In its place of receiving shed in buzzwords or obscure idealism, design Amber Valletta — who has been included in sustainability activism considering the fact that 2014 and was not too long ago named the Fashion Institute of Technology’s sustainability ambassador — advises students to hone in on certain concerns, like water conservation and bio-dependent fibers. Even now, it could be a dropping battle. Modern studies from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Adjust spell imminent weather doom — and we’re working out of time to change program. “We cannot get or innovate our way out of the weather crisis,” suggests Aditi Desai, who is pursuing a master’s diploma at Columbia’s sustainability management method.

Barnard professor Anne Higonnet, who teaches a seminar on apparel, wonders if what could be most impactful for pupils is a benefit change absent from today’s tradition of waste, where we purchase additional apparel than at any time but hardly ever maintain them for long. For their last assignment, Higonnet’s learners produce essays about outfits recollections, no matter if which is placing on a deceased parent’s sweater or a gown that would make them feel self-confident. “They feel about how many important memories they have related with outfits,” Higonnet suggests. That would make them additional likely to feel of a wardrobe as something which is intended to final a very long time — and as some thing that really should be built to.

Posted on

Twitter board adopts ‘poison pill’ after Musk’s $43 billion bid to buy company

Twitter board adopts ‘poison pill’ after Musk’s $43 billion bid to buy company

Twitter adopted a restricted length shareholder rights plan, typically named a “poison pill,” a working day following billionaire Elon Musk supplied to get the business for $43 billion, the company declared Friday.

The board voted unanimously to undertake the approach.

Beneath the new construction, if any individual or group acquires beneficial ownership of at the very least 15{cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809} of Twitter’s excellent common stock with out the board’s acceptance, other shareholders will be authorized to obtain supplemental shares at a price reduction.

The program is set to expire on April 14, 2023.

These types of a transfer is a common way to fend off a potential hostile takeover by diluting the stake of the entity eying the takeover.

Elon Musk’s Twitter profile shown on a laptop screen and Twitter logo displayed on a phone display screen are witnessed in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on April 9, 2022.

Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Photographs

“The Rights System will cut down the likelihood that any entity, human being or group gains handle of Twitter as a result of open up current market accumulation with out paying out all shareholders an proper command quality or with out giving the Board enough time to make informed judgments and choose actions that are in the finest pursuits of shareholders,” the corporation mentioned in a press launch.

Twitter noted that the rights prepare would not protect against the board from accepting an acquisition present if the board deems it in the ideal passions of the company and its shareholders.

Musk now owns a far more than 9{cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809} stake in Twitter as discovered in a Securities and Trade Fee filing very last week. Quickly following his stake turned general public, Twitter’s CEO introduced options for Musk to join the board. But days afterwards, Musk reversed study course and made a decision not to sign up for the board after all.

If he experienced joined, Musk would not be permitted to accumulate far more than 14.9{cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809} of beneficial ownership of the company’s remarkable common stock.

Also on Friday, Bloomberg described, citing nameless resources, that Twitter brought on JPMorgan to help answer to Musk’s bid. Twitter experienced previously been doing work with Goldman Sachs and Musk has been doing the job with Morgan Stanley.

Many shops together with The New York Article claimed Twitter was also fielding desire from Thoma Bravo, even though it truly is however unsure a bid will materialize, in accordance to resources who spoke to Reuters.

JPMorgan has history with Musk, suing Tesla about a issue linked to his 2018 tweet boasting he had “funding secured” to get the business personal. Tesla later on countersued the financial institution.

JPMorgan, Twitter and Thoma Bravo declined comment.

In a live-streamed job interview at the TED2022 conference in Vancouver on Thursday, Musk laid out his eyesight for producing Twitter’s algorithms much more publicly available and restricting content moderation.

He also acknowledged he’s “not sure” if he’ll basically be in a position to buy Twitter, though he explained he does have “enough belongings” to fund the offer if approved. Even with his fortune, Musk has much of his belongings tied up in fairness in his businesses including Tesla, indicating he’d probable have to liquidate or borrow from his assets to occur up with a massive sum.

But Musk explained “there is” a Program B if his preliminary provide to obtain the organization and choose it private, which he named his “best and final,” is rejected. He declined to provide further more aspects in the TED job interview.

On Friday, Twitter’s former CEO and recent board member Jack Dorsey tweeted that “the real situation” is that “as a public organization, twitter has constantly been ‘for sale.'”

Subscribe to CNBC on YouTube.

Observe: Twitter, Goldman Sachs, and IBM are some of present-day shares: Professional Sector Movers April 14

Posted on

Automotive production in US continues on rebound path

Automotive production in US continues on rebound path

US motor automobile and parts output shot up by 7.8{cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809} previous thirty day period, the biggest maximize considering the fact that October, just after a downwardly revised drop of 4.6{cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809} in February.

By :
|
Current on:
15 Apr 2022, 09:46 PM

File photo: Tesla vehicles are being assembled by robots at Tesla Motors Inc factory in Fremont, California. (REUTERS)
File image: Tesla cars are remaining assembled by robots at Tesla Motors Inc factory in Fremont, California. (REUTERS)

A sharp rebound in automotive output in March spurred a 3rd straight month to month obtain in US manufacturing facility activity, maybe signaling the worst of the creation woes that have dogged the motor car or truck market over the last year might have handed.

In general industrial generation improved .9{cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809} final thirty day period, holding speed with February’s upwardly revised tempo, the Federal Reserve reported on Friday. Economists polled by Reuters experienced forecast manufacturing unit manufacturing accelerating .4{cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809}. Output jumped 5.5{cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809} from a 12 months before.

Producing, which accounts for 11.9{cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809} of the American economy, has benefited from a change in paying to products from expert services for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic. But companies have struggled to cope with the powerful need whilst labor marketplaces have develop into extraordinarily restricted and supply bottlenecks have persisted due to Covid-19 lockdowns in China and the war in Ukraine.

Specifically tricky strike by offer difficulties has been the automotive sector, wherever output has been hampered for much more than a 12 months by a world-wide shortage of electronic components, specifically the pc chips wanted for present day progressively complicated auto working units.

But US motor auto and components manufacturing shot up by 7.8{cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809} final month, the largest improve since Oct, immediately after a downwardly revised fall of 4.6{cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809} in February. Overall assemblies of cars and light trucks rose to virtually 9.5 million vehicles at a seasonally altered once-a-year charge, the maximum since January 2021, up from 8.3 million the month just before.

Overall industrial sector ability utilization, a evaluate of how entirely companies are making use of their methods, rose to 78.3{cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809} previous month, the highest in more than a few several years, from 77.7{cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809} the thirty day period prior to. It is 1.2 percentage factors down below its 1972-2021 regular.

Ability use for the production sector greater to 78.7{cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809} in March, the optimum level since 2007, from 78.1{cfdf3f5372635aeb15fd3e2aecc7cb5d7150695e02bd72e0a44f1581164ad809} in February.

Officials at the Fed are inclined to search at ability use actions for alerts of how significantly “slack” continues to be in the financial system — how significantly growth has home to operate in advance of it results in being inflationary.

A independent report from the New York Federal Reserve on Friday showed manufacturing exercise in New York state has accelerated in April, even as inflationary pressures kept making.

Its Empire State Manufacturing Index rose to a 4-thirty day period high of 24.6 just after a reading through of destructive 11.8 in March. The survey’s costs compensated index shot to a document high of 86.4 from 73.8 previous month.

Optimism in the outlook waned, nevertheless, with the 6-month outlook index dropping to 15.2, the lowest in about two decades, from 36.6 in March.

Very first Posted Date: 15 Apr 2022, 09:46 PM IST

Posted on

Coronavirus news and updates for Friday, April 15, 2022

Coronavirus news and updates for Friday, April 15, 2022

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.

8:54 p.m.: It’s gonna be an egg-stra special day on Monday when the White House Easter Egg Roll returns from a two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden are expected to welcome some 30,000 kids and their adult chaperones for the egg roll, an egg hunt and other activities.

The annual egg rolling event was canceled by former President Donald Trump in 2020 and by Biden last year due to the pandemic that has killed nearly 1 million Americans.

First Lady Jill Biden, an educator, has dubbed this year’s all-day event the “Egg-ucation Roll,” aides said, turning the South Lawn into a school community with various educational stations.

Besides eggs-treme fun, the all-day event will include a schoolhouse activity area, reading nook, talent show, obstacle course and other exercise stations, and a cafe where kids will learn to make and eat supposedly healthy treats.

The shindig also includes celebs like “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon, singer Ciara and actor/singer Kristin Chenoweth.

More than two dozen costumed characters will roam the grounds, including Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat, the Racing Presidents mascots for the Washington Nationals of Major League Baseball, Rosita and Cookie Monster from “Sesame Street” and Snoopy and Charlie Brown, among others.

8 p.m.: After a sustained pandemic-induced dip in air travel, Canadians are slowly starting to board flights again. International arrivals are up compared to last year, Statistics Canada data shows, although still significantly below pre-pandemic levels.

While people are on the move, the country is staring down a sixth wave of COVID-19 infections — driven by the BA. 2 variant spreads and the lifting of public health measures.

System-wide decisions, from mask mandates to access to testing, have a significant impact on overall safety, said Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO) at the University of Saskatchewan. These policies also reduce the chance that Canadian travellers will take the virus elsewhere.

Yet travellers can still make the best of the tools at their disposal to keep themselves and others safe. Speaking to the Star, Rasmussen — who is about to attend a work conference in Portugal — shared her advice on how to navigate travel in the age of Omicron.

Click here to read more of this story from the Star’s Sara Mojtahedzadeh.

7:22 p.m.: The 75-year-old Republican said in an announcement late Friday he was diagnosed by his personal physician after experiencing mild symptoms such as a runny nose, head ache, body aches and a sore throat.

DeWine was administered a monoclonal antibody treatment, which is designed to fight the infection. He said he is following the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention protocol and quarantining.

The governor’s office said First Lady Fran DeWine was experiencing no symptoms and has tested negative. Both the governor and his wife have received two coronavirus vaccines and a booster.

DeWine’s diagnosis comes just 18 days before Ohio’s May 3 primary, in which he faces two Republican challengers, and just eight days before former President Donald Trump plans an Ohio rally.

It was unclear whether his diagnosis would affect DeWine’s attendance at the rally, or if he would have attended in any case. He had previous plans to attend a celebration of the 200th birthday of President Ulysses S. Grant, an Ohio native, on that day.

DeWine tested positive for COVID-19 once before, in 2020, before testing negative later the same day. Those conflicting results came just before the governor was to meet with Trump, then the president, in Cleveland.

4:55 p.m.: Yet again, the U.S. is trudging into what could be another COVID-19 surge, with cases rising nationally and in most states after a two-month decline.

One big unknown? “We don’t know how high that mountain’s gonna grow,” said Dr. Stuart Campbell Ray, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University.

No one expects a peak nearly as high as the last one, when the contagious omicron version of the coronavirus ripped through the population.

But experts warn that the coming wave – caused by a mutant called BA.2 that’s thought to be about 30 per cent more contagious – will wash across the nation. They worry that hospitalizations, which are already ticking up in some parts of the Northeast, will rise in a growing number of states in the coming weeks. And the case wave will be bigger than it looks, they say, because reported numbers are vast undercounts as more people test at home without reporting their infections or skip testing altogether.

2:02 p.m. A hospital in western Quebec is suspending its obstetrics services for the holiday weekend due to a lack of staff.

The health authority for the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region says the service at the hospital in Ville-Marie is suspended until Monday at 8 a.m. due to an unforeseen staffing issue.

The Centre intégré de santé et de services sociaux de l’Abitibi-Témiscamingue says on Facebook that it has reached out to women who are affected by the closure, and those giving birth will be redirected to another hospital about 130 kilometres away.

The health authority also announced on Thursday that emergency services at the Témiscaming-Kipawa health facility would be closed Friday, Saturday and Sunday night from 7:30 p.m. to 7:30 a.m.

Quebec’s health minister has warned that the province’s health services are looking at a difficult few weeks ahead as they struggle with a sixth wave of COVID-19 coupled with a rise in influenza and other viruses.

While officials did not say what caused the closures in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, the province has said about 13,000 health workers are off the job due to COVID-19.

1:08 p.m. Los Angeles County on Friday ended its order to quarantine asymptomatic people exposed to the coronavirus.

The rule change means anyone — even someone not vaccinated for COVID-19 or up-to-date with a booster shot — who is exposed to an infected person no longer needs to stay home for at least five days to see whether they will test positive or become sick, provided they remain symptom-free.

But unlike the California Department of Public Health, which universally relaxed its quarantine recommendations for the public earlier this month, L.A. County has established a few conditions for waiving the waiting period.

The county will require, not merely recommend, that people who were in close contact with an infected person “wear a highly protective mask around others, especially indoors, for a total of 10 days after the last contact with a person infected” with the coronavirus, and get tested within three to five days after their last exposure to the infected person.

Anyone who lives or works in L.A. County is subject to that masking order.

Someone is considered exposed to the coronavirus if they share the same indoor airspace — like a home, clinic waiting room or airplane — with an infected person during his or her contagious period for at least 15 minutes over a 24-hour period.

12:46 p.m. Yet again, the U.S. is trudging into what could be another COVID-19 surge, with cases rising nationally and in most states after a two-month decline.

One big unknown? “We don’t know how high that mountain’s gonna grow,” said Dr. Stuart Campbell Ray, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University.

No one expects a peak nearly as high as the last one, when the contagious omicron version of the coronavirus ripped through the population.

But experts warn that the coming wave – caused by a mutant called BA.2 that’s thought to be about 30 per cent more contagious – will wash across the nation and push up hospitalizations in a growing number of states in the coming weeks. And the case wave will be bigger than it looks, they say, because reported numbers are vast undercounts as more people test at home without reporting their infections or skip testing altogether.

At the height of the previous omicron surge, reported daily cases reached into the hundreds of thousands. On April 14, the seven-day rolling average for daily new cases rose to 39,521, up from 30,724 two weeks earlier, according to data from Johns Hopkins collected by The Associated Press.

11:41 a.m. Starting Monday, Minneapolis students will no longer have to wear masks at school or on buses, the school district said Thursday as it announced changes to its COVID-19 protocols.

The news came two days after St. Paul’s school board voted 6-1 to change the mask policy for that district, removing the mandate and allowing students and faculty to choose whether or not to wear a face covering in school buildings.

Besides dropping its mask mandate, Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) will discontinue universal contract tracing, officials said. That means families may not be notified if someone in their student’s class tests positive for COVID-19.

District officials also said that beginning Monday, fully vaccinated students and staff will no longer be required to isolate after COVID-19 exposure and the quarantine time for unvaccinated students and adults in the schools will drop from 10 days to five days.

10:27 a.m. A Toronto public school board committee that advocates on behalf of students with special needs wants to bring back mandatory masking and vaccination for those who work with medically fragile children.

The Special Education Advisory Committee has written to the province’s top doctor requesting permission for the board to reintroduce masking rules and its vaccination policy at congregated schools that serve students with complex special needs, many of whom have multiple disabilities.

“Recent changes to COVID-19 safety measures, specifically regarding masking and vaccination requirements, have put these students at great risk of contracting the virus,” say SEAC members in a letter to the chief medical officer of health, Dr. Kieran Moore. “The COVID-19 virus poses great risks for any of these students, as it may exacerbate existing symptoms of their already complex disabilities and medical fragilities.”

Read the full story from the Star’s Isabel Teotonio

5:58 a.m.: Small business owners have made a plea to the federal finance minister to consider more help paying off their pandemic-related debts as the sixth wave of COVID-19 causes customers to stay home and sales to fall.

The request is one Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has faced repeatedly in recent days during a cross-country post-budget tour.

Her response has been that emergency measures are no longer needed with the crisis passed, the economy running hot and the government needing to tighten its fiscal belt.

Dan Kelly, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, said underneath the headline economic numbers only two in five of his members report being back to normal sales.

He said more are worried about the impact on revenues and their ability to repay loans with people staying home despite provinces removing public health restrictions.

His members put those concerns to Freeland during a webinar on the budget and Kelly said he walked away believing the finance minister heard their concerns.

The budget doesn’t include any further extensions of emergency benefit programs that will come to a close on May 7, but Freeland told those on the webinar, “I hear you,” when asked about debt relief, adding a moment later, “let’s keep on talking.”

Thursday, 9:35 p.m.: California is sticking with its coronavirus vaccine mandate for schoolchildren, but it won’t happen until at least the summer of 2023, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration announced Thursday.

Last year, California was the first state to announce it would require all schoolchildren to receive the coronavirus vaccine. But it hasn’t happened yet because Newsom said he was waiting for regulators at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to give final approval to the vaccine for school-aged children.

At the time, Newsom estimated the mandate would take effect for the start of the 2022-23 school year. But while federal regulators have authorized use of the coronavirus vaccine for children as young as 5 in an emergency, it has still not given final approval to anyone younger than 16.

As the calendar inches closer to the fall, school administrators had worried they would not have enough time to implement the vaccine mandate.

“So based on these two facts — we don’t have full FDA approval, and we recognize the implementation challenges that schools and school leaders would face — that we are not moving to have a vaccine requirement for schools in this coming academic year and no sooner than July 2023,” California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly said in an interview.

Read Thursday’s coronavirus news.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

Conversations are opinions of our readers and are subject to the Code of Conduct. The Star does not endorse these opinions.