Today's coronavirus news: Ontario reporting 200 cases, 9 deaths Friday; Ontario accelerating second doses for kids aged 12-17; Trudeau getting his second dose today - Toronto Star

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.

10:19 a.m.: Ontario reporting 200 new cases of COVID-19 Friday and 284 cases on Thursday. The province is also reporting nine death Friday and 19 deaths on Thursday.

Locally, there are 41 new cases in the Region of Waterloo, 23 in Toronto, 21 in Peel Region and 18 in Grey Bruce on Friday. Nearly 25,200 tests were completed on July 1 and over 26,900 tests on June 30.

10:11 a.m. (Updated 11:19 a.m.): Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has received his second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine on Friday.

The prime minister’s itinerary shows he’s getting a shot of the Moderna mRNA vaccine at an Ottawa clinic.

His wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, got her second dose on Thursday.

The Trudeaus got their first doses in late April and received the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.

Trudeau has said vaccinations are a path out of the pandemic and praised Canadians in his Canada Day message for getting their shots to help life return to normal.

The prime minister is also set to make an appearance at a vaccine clinic with Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson on Friday.

10:05 a.m.: All Ontario youth can move up their second COVID-19 vaccine doses next week.

The change takes effect on Monday at 8 a.m.

Youth aged 12 to 17 can move up their appointments through the provincial booking system, pharmacies or local public health units.

Vaccines are initially booked four months apart in the province but people now have the option of re-booking for an earlier date.

The province says it’s aiming to provide more protection against COVID-19 and allow for a safe return to school in the fall.

Youth are only eligible for doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

8:41 a.m.: Pakistan received 2.5 million doses of the Moderna vaccine from the United States on Friday, easing pressure on Islamabad in overcoming the shortage of COVID-19 vaccines.

According to a U.S. embassy statement, the vaccines were delivered to the Pakistani people in partnership with the COVAX global vaccine initiative, UNICEF, and the government of Pakistan.

It says this donation was part of the 80 million doses the United States was sharing with the world, “delivering on our pledge to facilitate equitable global access to safe and effective vaccines, which are essential to ending the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The latest development comes days after hundreds of Pakistani expatriate workers rallied in Islamabad, demanding they should be quickly vaccinated with the Moderna, Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccines so they can travel abroad.

Pakistan has mostly relied on Chinese vaccines, but some Middle Eastern countries want travelers to produce a certificate to show they’ve received specific vaccines.

8:40 a.m.: Russian authorities reported a record-breaking 679 new coronavirus deaths on Friday, a fourth day in a row with the highest daily death toll in the pandemic.

No plans for a lockdown are being discussed, however, the Kremlin insisted.

The previous record, of 672 deaths, was registered on Thursday. Russia has struggled to cope with a surge in infections and deaths in recent weeks that comes amid slow vaccination rates.

Daily new infections have more than doubled over the past month, soaring from around 9,000 in early June to over 20,000 this week. On Friday, Russia's state coronavirus task force reported 23,218 new contagions. Moscow, its outlying region and St. Petersburg account for nearly half of all new cases.

Yet the authorities are not discussing a lockdown, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday. “No one wants any lockdowns,” Peskov told reporters during a daily conference call, admitting that the situation with coronavirus in a number of Russian regions is “tense.”

8:40 a.m.: The Vatican’s bioethics academy and the World Medical Association called Friday for an all-out effort to combat vaccine hesitancy and correct the “myths and disinformation” that are slowing the fight against the coronavirus.

In a joint statement, the groups said some vaccine reluctance in poorer countries is rooted in historical inequalities and suspicions of Western pharmaceutical companies. But they said “a more pernicious form” of hesitancy is being driven by fake news, myths and disinformation about vaccine safety, including among religious groups and some in the medical community.

They demanded that “all relevant stakeholders exhaust all efforts to ... confront vaccine hesitancy by sending a clear message about the safety and necessity of vaccines and counteracting vaccine myths and disinformation.”

The statement was issued after a daylong webinar on vaccines sponsored by the Pontifical Academy for Life, the France-based World Medical Association, an international organization grouping national physicians associations and individual doctors, and the German Medical Association.

At a news conference Friday, representatives of the groups strongly rejected claims and questions about vaccine safety and ethics from reporters representing conservative and right-wing Catholic media organizations who complained that vaccine skeptics weren’t included among the speakers.

8:39 a.m.: Germany is recommending that all people who get a first shot of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine switch to a different type of vaccine for their second shot. The aim is to increase the speed and effectiveness of vaccinations as the more contagious delta variant spreads.

Health Minister Jens Spahn conferred with his colleagues from Germany's 16 states on Friday, the day after the country's standing committee on vaccination issued a draft recommendation. In a statement, the committee said that “according to current study results,” the immune response from a mixture of AstraZeneca with an mRNA vaccine was “significantly superior” to that from two doses of AstraZeneca.

It recommended that the second dose with an mRNA vaccine — Germany uses those made by BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna — be administered four weeks or more after the first AstraZeneca shot. That is much shorter than the nine to 12 weeks the committee recommends between two doses of AstraZeneca.

The committee, known by its German acronym STIKO, didn't detail what studies its conclusion was based on. Germany's disease control center noted that it was a draft, and that a final recommendation with more detail and sourcing will follow. Researchers have said that mixing vaccines is likely safe and effective, but are still gathering data to be sure.

6:57 a.m.: Banning all fans from the Tokyo Olympics is still an option with the games opening during a pandemic in just three weeks, Seiko Hashimoto, the president of the Tokyo organizing committee, said Friday.

This would be a reversal of a decision spelled out 10 days ago by organizers to allow a limited number of local fans — up to 10,000 — to attend. Fans from abroad were banned months ago as too great a risk.

The possible about-face is being forced by rising new infections in Tokyo, the appearance of the rapidly spreading delta variant, and fears that the Olympics and Paralympics with 15,400 athletes and tens of thousands of others entering Japan could turn into a super-spreader event.

“The situation of infection changes and how it will be — it is still unclear," Hashimoto said in a Friday briefing. “But from Tokyo 2020s perspective, we also include an option of not having spectators.”

Yet another decision on fans could be announced next week after a meeting of the International Olympic Committee, local organizers, the Japanese government, Tokyo metropolitan government officials, and the International Paralympic Committee.

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The government’s top COVID-19 adviser, Dr. Shigeru Omi, has said repeatedly that the safest option is without any fans. And Yuriko Koike, the governor of Tokyo, suggested Friday that has been her preference too.

6:54 a.m.: The latest alarming coronavirus variant is exploiting low global vaccination rates and a rush to ease pandemic restrictions, adding new urgency to the drive to get more shots in arms and slow its supercharged spread.

The vaccines most used in Western countries still appear to offer strong protection against the highly contagious delta variant, first identified in India and now spreading in more than 90 other countries.

But the World Health Organization warned this week that the trifecta of easier-to-spread strains, insufficiently immunized populations and a drop in mask use and other public health measures before the virus is better contained will “delay the end of the pandemic.”

The delta variant is positioned to take full advantage of those weaknesses.

“Any suffering or death from COVID-19 is tragic. With vaccines available across the country, the suffering and loss we are now seeing is nearly entirely avoidable,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Thursday in urging more Americans to roll up their sleeves ahead of the mutant’s spread.

Amid concerns about the variant, parts of Europe have reinstated travel quarantines, several Australian cities are in outbreak-sparked lockdowns — and just as Japan readies for the Olympics, some visiting athletes are infected. The mutation is causing worry even in countries with relatively successful immunization campaigns that nonetheless haven’t reached enough people to snuff out the virus.

6:53 a.m.: As the World Health Organization draws up plans for the next phase of its probe of how the coronavirus pandemic started, an increasing number of scientists say the U.N. agency it isn’t up to the task and shouldn’t be the one to investigate.

Numerous experts, some with strong ties to WHO, say that political tensions between the U.S. and China make it impossible for an investigation by the agency to find credible answers.

They say what’s needed is a broad, independent analysis closer to what happened in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

The first part of a joint WHO-China study of how COVID-19 started concluded in March that the virus probably jumped to humans from animals and that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely.” The next phase might try to examine the first human cases in more detail or pinpoint the animals responsible — possibly bats, perhaps by way of some intermediate creature.

But the idea that the pandemic somehow started in a laboratory — and perhaps involved an engineered virus — has gained traction recently, with President Joe Biden ordering a review of U.S. intelligence within 90 days to assess the possibility.

Earlier this month, WHO’s emergencies chief, Dr. Michael Ryan, said that the agency was working out the final details of the next phase of its probe and that because WHO works “by persuasion,” it lacks the power to compel China to co-operate.

6:52 a.m.: Argentine officials say they will study the possibility of combining two different COVID-19 vaccines due to the delayed arrival of Russia’s Sputnik V for many who already received a first dose.

Buenos Aires city Health Minister Fernán Quirós tells Radio Mitre that officials would choose a random sample of potential volunteers to receive a second dose of vaccines made by AstraZeneca or China’s Sinopharm, or wait for a second shot of Sputnik likely starting in mid-August.

Several other countries have tried mixing vaccines due to distribution delays or safety concerns.

Some 70,000 people in Buenos Aires got an initial shot of Sputnik V three months ago and are still waiting a second dose. The number is about 300,000 nationwide.

The country has seen a renewed wave of infections at the start of the Southern Hemisphere winter.

6:51 a.m.: South Korea has reported 826 new cases of the coronavirus, its biggest daily jump in about six months, as fears grow about another huge wave of the virus in the greater capital area.

The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency said Friday that 633 of the cases came from the Seoul metropolitan area, home to half of the country’s 51 million people, where officials pushed back an easing of social distancing measures as infections soared over the past week.

Dozens of infections were each reported in other major cities and regions, including Busan, Daejeon and South Chungcheong Province.

Some health experts say government officials sent the wrong message to the public by announcing plans to allow for larger gatherings and longer indoor dining hours at restaurants starting this month to ease the pandemic’s shock on the economy. The experts say a premature easing of social distancing could have disastrous consequences when the country has administered first doses of vaccines to just 30 per cent of its population and most younger adults remain unvaccinated.

South Korea has reported 158,549 cases, including 2,024 deaths.

6:51 a.m.: India on Thursday crossed the grim milestone of more than 400,000 people lost to the coronavirus, a number that though massive is still thought to be a vast undercount because of a lack of testing and reporting.

More than half of India’s reported coronavirus deaths — the third most of any country — have occurred over the past two months as the the delta variant of the virus tore through the country and overwhelmed the already strained health system.

New cases are on the decline after exceeding 400,000 a day in May, but authorities are preparing for another possible wave and are trying to ramp up vaccination.

The Health Ministry said that 853 people died in the past 24 hours, raising total fatalities to 400,312. It also reported 46,617 new cases, taking the country’s pandemic total past 30.4 million.

India, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, is the third to cross 400,000 deaths, after the United States and Brazil.

6:30 a.m.: The province resumed in-car driving tests on June 14, but the backlog to book a road test is staggering. The Ministry of Transportation said 421,827 road tests have been cancelled since March 2020 due to pandemic-related lockdowns.

The ministry said it has invested $16 million to deal with the backlog. Last fall it said it would hire 84 temporary driver examiners for its DriveTest centres, and has so far filled 35 of those positions. It recently announced it would hire 167 additional driver examiners, and recruitment is underway with the goal to have everyone on board by September.

The ministry said it will also add six temporary locations and offer road testing seven days a week where demand is highest, namely the Toronto area.

Read the full story from the Canadian Press here.

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Today's coronavirus news: Ontario reporting 200 cases, 9 deaths Friday; Ontario accelerating second doses for kids aged 12-17; Trudeau getting his second dose today - Toronto Star
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