Today’s covid-19 news: After Coronavirus-related delays, 16-year-old N.S. girl gets lung transplant; Donald Trump Jr. Tests Positive for Coronavirus;
The latest coronavirus news from Canada and around the world Saturday. This file will be updated throughout the day. Web links to longer stories if available. 7:11 a.m.: Poland will allow shopping malls to reopen, while keeping restaurants, cinemas and schools closed as Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki asked for more patience until a virus vaccine arrives. “We need 100 more days of solidarity,” Morawiecki told reporters on Saturday. “Now we need to ask of ourselves more than ever.”
Poland introduced a near-full lockdown earlier this month after Covid-19 infections surged in October, with daily deaths climbing to a record 637 earlier this week. Schools will remain closed until at least mid-January, while gyms, cinemas, theaters and restaurants won’t reopen before Dec. 27. 7:08 a.m.: Iran on Saturday shuttered businesses and curtailed travel between its major cities, including the capital of Tehran, as it grapples with the worst outbreak of the coronavirus in the Mideast region.
Top Iranian officials initially downplayed the risks posed by the virus outbreak, before recently urging the public to follow measures like wearing masks and avoiding unessential travel. Iran has recorded daily death tolls of above 430 over the past five days. The Iranian Health Ministry said on Saturday that the total number of confirmed cases has risen to above 840,000.
It said a record 467 people died of COVID-19.
The surge in infections is straining Russia’s vast but underfunded health care system, with many infected people reportedly forced to search for sparse hospital beds. Overall, Russia has recorded more than 2,064,000 cases and 35,778 deaths. 7 a.m.: A teenaged girl who set out with her grandmother and mother last spring on a 1,800-kilometre RV trip to seek her new lungs has received the life-changing operation in an era of COVID-related delays.
Tahlia Ali left Halifax on May 20 after receiving word that medical specialists preferred she be near the University Health Network and the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto as the pandemic continued. In June, when she last spoke to The Canadian Press, the 16-year-old said she felt ready for the oft-delayed operation, as her energy levels had fallen.
Her grandmother, Judy Robichaud, describes the double lung transplant performed on Monday as "very successful She says the initial surgery to repair two holes in Tahlia's heart was somewhat more difficult than expected because the heart was more enlarged than anticipated. Robichaud estimates the dual operations required 13 hours. 6:01 a.m.: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's effort to try and bring rivals onside to help communicate the dramatic implications of rising COVID-19 infections appears to have faltered.
While Trudeau stood in front of his home Friday and implored Canadians to stay in theirs, opposition leaders didn't echo that message. Trudeau had given them a briefing late Thursday on the new modelling data that predicts as many as 20,000 new cases a day by the end of December without urgent action.
6 a.m.: At the northeast corner of Queen Street East and Airport Road in Brampton begins a large stretch of multi-sized warehouses, factories and shops. On any given day, the movement of small and large trucks getting in, loading or unloading, and getting back out is about the only observable activity in the area, save from the occasional construction work. It’s kilometres in either direction before you reach residential parts of the neighbourhood, a mixture of multi-unit housing buildings and stand-alone or semi-detached homes.
This is the part of the GTA that has emerged as the most affected by COVID-19. Earlier this week, the Star reported that the northeast corner of Brampton has a COVID-19 positivity rate of 19 per cent, that is to say nearly one in five people here tests positive for the virus, based on analysis conducted by non-profit ICES. Peel region as a whole has a positivity rate of 9.8, which is the highest in the GTA.
Click here to read the full story. 6 a.m.: To look at Toronto’s latest job figures, you’d think the city’s economy had largely bounced back. The numbers, which plummeted in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, have largely come back, from an average of 3.04 million jobs in May to an average of 3.4 million jobs for the three months ending in October, according to Statistics Canada data for the census metropolitan area.
And jobs in the information, culture and recreation sector during the same time period are higher even than they were last year — 178,000 compared to 153,500 in 2019.
A deeper look at the numbers that fuel the local economy, though, shows some industries have been devastated, namely the sectors that rely on people congregating.
Click here to read the full story.
5:36 a.m.: Singapore and Hong Kong on Saturday postponed the start of an air travel bubble meant to boost tourism for both cities, amid a spike in coronavirus infections in Hong Kong.
The travel bubble, originally slated to begin Sunday, will be delayed by at least two weeks, Hong Kong’s minister of commerce and economic development, Edward Yau, said at a news conference.
The arrangement is meant to allow travellers between the two cities to travel without having to serve a quarantine as long as they complete coronavirus tests before and after arriving at their destinations, and fly on designated flights.
Intensive care wards and the capital’s main crematorium are near capacity, and health officials this week found the prevalence of infections in markets much higher than expected. The city has added an average of 6,700 cases each day in recent weeks.
The next two weeks in the post-festival season, including celebrations for the Diwali holiday, are going to be important in determining which way the virus will go. The Health Ministry on Saturday also registered 564 deaths in the past 24 hours, taking total fatalities up to 132,726.
4:06 a.m.: Japan is scaling back on the government-backed “GoTo” campaign to encourage travel and dining out, as the number of confirmed coronavirus cases reached a record for the third day straight on Saturday, at 2,418.
Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced the decision at a government panel on coronavirus pandemic measures.
Stressing the need for “utmost caution,” he said the campaign’s travel discounts will no longer apply to hard-hit areas, and discounts on eating out will end temporarily.
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Japan has never had a total lockdown. It has had fewer than 2,000 deaths so far related to the coronavirus. But worries have been growing about a spike in infections over the three-day weekend. Monday is Labor Thanksgiving, a national holiday.
4:02 a.m.: South Korea has reported 386 new cases of the coronavirus in a resurgence that could force authorities to reimpose stronger social distancing restrictions after easing them in October to spur a faltering economy.
The figures released by the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency on Saturday raised the country's total number of confirmed cases to 30,403, including 503 deaths.
More than 270 of the new cases have come from the Seoul metropolitan area, where health workers have struggled to track transmissions in schools, private tutoring academies and religious facilities.
4 a.m.: The latest numbers of confirmed #COVID-19 cases in Canada as of 4:00 a.m. EST on Nov. 21, 2020: