A look at the local numbers …
Public Health Sudbury & Districts is reporting there were no new active cases on Tuesday.
Considering resolved cases, there are 50 active cases in the agency’s jurisdiction.
Health Sciences North has 20 admitted patients, four positives and the other 12 waiting for test results.
The hospital has five people in intensive care.
Algoma Public Health is reporting five new cases of COVID-19, all from the Sault Ste. Marie area.
Considering resolved cases, there are 30 active cases in the district with one person hospitalized.
Nationally, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam says we must stick to current health measures to avoid back-to-back waves of COVID-19.
She adds Health Canada is now looking at another clinical trial on vaccine mixing in Spain.
She explains early data from the U.K. study suggests using the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine as a second dose after AstraZeneca’s first dose is safe.
Tam said the feds will need to take a closer look at the studies, with results from the UK trial expected by the end of May.
Reopening plans for Ontario
Health Minister Christine Elliott says the provincial government will release details of its reopening plan “very soon.”
But it won’t be a return to the colour-coded framework first unveiled last November.
Elliott says the new program will likely be sector-specific…..which industries and activities can be resumed safely and when, as well as the scale of protective measures they might need to open
safely.
Elliott has already said that the ban on some outdoor individual sports, like golf and tennis, will be lifted on or before the current stay-at-home order expires on June 2nd.
Border remains closed for the time being
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the border between Canada and the U-S likely won’t be reopened for a few months yet.
Trudeau says we have to reach a goal of 75 percent of Canadians having had at least one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine….with 20 percent of us having had both inoculations.
We’re on track to reach that goal by September.
The land border was closed in March of last year.
Building our own vaccine production plant
The federal government is investing 200-million dollars into a Mississauga plant that will be able to churn out millions of doses of vaccines.
The expansion of the facilities at Resilience Biotechnologies will allow it to produce M-R-N-A vaccines, similar to the COVID-19 products from Pfizer and Moderna.
The expansion, which is expected to be completed in 2024, would allow the plant to produce up to 640-million vaccine doses a year.
The goal is to reduce Canada’s dependence on foreign manufacturers when the next pandemic hits.
Fatalities rise in India
COVID-19 numbers in India continue to soar, with the country reporting a world-record-high 45-hundred more fatalities today.
The country’s death toll is now six times higher than it was in the past month.
The number of new cases is below 300-thousand for the third day in a row.
But hospitals are still swamped with patients, and the number of vaccinations each day continues to fall.
Health experts say India’s numbers are likely under-counted by a wide margin.