An overpass in Mexico City’s metro collapsed Monday night, sending a train downward, trapping cars under rubble and injuring at least 50 people, authorities said.
The incident happened around 10:30 p.m. local time on the metro’s Line 12, the construction of which has been plagued by complaints and accusations of irregularities.
Photos and video from the scene show people climbing ladders to help those trapped inside out of the train through windows.
Alfonso Suarez del Real, secretary of Mexico City’s government, told Milenio Television that the injured were being taken to hospitals.
Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum rushed to the area where at least one broken train could be seen along with dozens of rescuers searching through wreckage.
The province says people aged 18 and over and who live in a COVID-19 hotspot zone will be able to book to get their coronavirus vaccine starting at 8 a.m. Monday.
The Ontario government says an increase in the supply of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has allowed them to expand booking eligibility.
“With additional supply our government is increasing access to the COVID-19 vaccines in the communities hardest hit by COVID-19,” said Christine Elliott, Deputy Premier and Minister of Health in a news release Sunday.
People will be able to book their appointment either through the provincial booking system or through municipal public health units that use their own system.
The vaccines will be administered at mass immunization clinics, the province said.
The government has identified 114 communities as priority areas for vaccines– and the province says they want to allocate around 50 per cent of vaccines to those areas during the weeks of May 3 and 10.
Eligibility will expand further on Thursday when online bookings open up to residents 50 and older, the province said. Others captured in that expansion include people with high-risk health conditions, those who can’t work from home including teachers and school workers and First Nation, Inuit and Metis people not previously targeted in earlier phases of the immunization drive.
Thursday’s planned expansion to those with high-risk health conditions include those living with obesity, developmental disabilities and treatments requiring immunosuppression among others.
All adults in hot spots have been cleared for immunization for some time, though they could not book through the provincial website. Instead, residents have been getting shots at pop-up and mobile clinics, sometimes standing in line for hours.
Ontario said it will return to per capita distribution for vaccines on the week of May 17.
If supply holds, the province expects to make those 18 and older eligible for a shot at mass sites provincewide on the week of May 24.
The federal government is facing some criticism after making some changes to Bill C-10, including the ability for the videos you post to be subjected to Canada’s rules for broadcasters.
Michael Geist, Canada’s research chair in internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, says the changes to the bill are problematic for everyone.
“TikTok videos, or YouTube posts or things [Canadians] put up on Instagram, would all be treated as a program by the regulator by the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission), and subject potentially to regulation,” he explains.
“We’re still trying to figure out precisely what the CRTC would do. I mean, I think the government’s injected a huge amount of uncertainty into this process by opening the door to these kinds of powers and effectively leaving it to the regulator to make those kinds of decisions.”
Geist adds the main question that the feds need to answer is whether or not the CRTC can be in a position to regulate individual users’ speech?
“In many ways. This speech, whether on TikTok posts or YouTube videos, is for the current generation. It’s their form of expression. It’s how they speak. And for my generation, that might have been blog posts or emails. A prior generation, perhaps faxes or letters,” Geist explains. “We never would have imagined the CRTC would have the power to regulate our faxes or letters or emails. But somehow, the government thinks it’s appropriate to give them that kind of regulatory power over this new form of speech on these other kinds of sites.”
Geist adds the changes to the bill will also affect the desire for social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to include Canadian content so that they are not responsible for regulating what users upload.
Currently, the CRTC ensures a certain amount of television programs and music on the radio has to be Canadian content, but the bill would extend those rules to social media and individual users too.
Toronto Public Health (TPH) says they are investigating a possible COVID-19 outbreak at one of the federal government’s designated quarantine hotels.
The Crowne Plaza Hotel, located at 22 Carlson Court, in the Highway 27 and Dixon Road area, is the focus of the investigation, public health confirmed on Sunday.
“Toronto Public Health is aware of cases in individuals linked to this workplace,” said Dr. Vinita Dubey, associate medical officer of health. “We have assigned staff to initiate an investigation and to work with the facility to identify all cases, and review and advise on all appropriate public health measures and infection prevention and control measures.”
TPH has not said how many people may be infected with the novel coronavirus or how the outbreak began.
People travelling into Canada on an international flight are supposed to stay in a government-authorized hotel while waiting on the result of a COVID-19 test taken shortly after landing. That rule has been in place since the end of February and was brought in as part of the effort to curb the spread of COVID-19.
Anyone who breaks a rule under the Quarantine Act can face a fine of up to $3,000.
If you break your mandatory quarantine or isolation requirements and you cause the death or serious bodily harm to another person, you could face a fine of up to $1 million or up to three years in jail — or both.
Ontario’s air ambulance paramedics have raised the possibility of going on strike – an “absolute last consideration” if they can’t land an exemption from a provincial law that caps their salaries.
Unifor, the union representing Ornge workers, said Sunday that paramedics voted 94 per cent in favour of strike action, if necessary, in a vote tabulated on Friday.
Ornge paramedics have taken issue with Bill 124, which came into effect in 2019 and caps public sector wage increases to one per cent a year.
Unifor National President Jerry Dias called the wage-cap law a “foolish piece of legislation” in a virtual press conference on Sunday, adding that the one per cent bump is “well below even the rate of inflation.”
“Enough is enough,” Dias said. “We can’t keep telling people how essential they are how important (they are), and then pass legislation that takes these paramedics and puts them into a separate bucket than all the other paramedics in this province. That doesn’t make any sense.”
The union members’ vote was to determine whether they’d be willing to take strike action. If they do choose to strike, they would first have to give notice.
Dias said Unifor is putting together an essential services protocol, which would outline services that are deemed essential for paramedics.
A Unifor spokesperson said paramedics will continue to provide those services. Unifor added that a date has not been secured to mediate the negotiations of an essential services agreement with the Ontario Labour Relations Board.
Ornge said union members rejected a recent tentative agreement that complied with Bill 124.
Paramedics who work for Ornge have been without a contract since July 31.
A spokesman for the medical transportation service said he believes both parties will be able to come to an agreement.
The Ministry of Labour said in an emailed statement Sunday that it has to remain neutral on labour relations matters.
“We encourage the employer and the union to make every effort to resolve their differences at the bargaining table,” a spokesperson for the ministry said.
The Ministry of Health did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ornge paramedics have been instrumental in helping transfer critically ill COVID-19 patients to intensive care units across the province. They also helped implement Ontario’s vaccination plan in remote communities.
Michael Garron Hospital says it was forced to cancel some surgical procedures and divert ambulances to other hospitals to protect the supply of oxygen at the hospital.
In a statement to CityNews, the hospital said it was forced to take “precautionary measures” to preserve its oxygen resource and was working on expanding its on-site oxygen capacity.
The hospital maintained that at no time were any patients at risk.
“Early [Thursday] morning, Michael Garron Hospital identified potential risks to its oxygen supply due to the high volume of COVID-19 patients requiring oxygen at the hospital,” said Mark Fam, Vice President, Programs. “The hospital also brought on additional temporary oxygen capacity, so that all patients requiring oxygen in the hospital have what they need.”
The hospital said a “small number” of patients needed to be transferred but did not specify how many and where they were sent.
Michael Garron is currently treating 61 COVID-19 patients in its hospital.
Earlier this month, hospitals ramped down non-urgent procedures and were also given the authority to transfer patients to other hospitals without their consent by the provincial government.
Toronto Public Health has ordered the partial closure of three more businesses due to COVID-19.
The closures include The Vinyl Company on Fenmar Drive, the Canada Goose office in Scarborough and the Ellis-Don “Brixton” construction site on Dufferin Street just north of Queen Street West.
The Ellis-Don closure affects sub-contractors Torino Drywall, Inc., Tri-Clean Building Services, Inc., Zerem Electrical Services, Figure 3, and Royalguard Industries Inc.
This is the second Ellis-Don construction site affected by the public health order after its site at the Michael Garron Hospital on Coxwell Street was partially closed back on April 23.
Sixteen Toronto businesses have been shuttered since the Section 22 orders came into effect last week. The businesses will remain closed for at least 10 days and affected workers are required to self-isolate and are also unable to work at other workplaces during the isolation period.
Businesses will be ordered closed if five or more workers test positive for the virus over a 14 day period.
On Thursday, SHW Pumps & Engine Components Inc., in Brampton became the first business to be fully closed by Peel Public Health under the new orders. Ten other businesses have been partially closed in the region.
Both Toronto and Peel public health units introduced the orders last week, saying the primary objective is to separate employees from one another in workplaces where transmission of COVID-19 is identified.
The director of an Israeli ambulance service has confirmed that nearly 40 people died in a stampede at a religious festival in northern Israel.
Eli Beer, director of Hatzalah, told Army Radio that there were four to five times the number of people that should have entered a location like this. “Close to 40 people died as a result of this tragedy,” he said.
The disaster occurred at celebrations of Lag BaOmer, a holiday when tens of thousands of people, mostly ultra-Orthodox Jews, gather to honour Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, a 2nd century sage and mystic who is buried there. Large crowds traditionally light bonfires, pray and dance as part of the celebrations.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “great tragedy,” and said everyone was praying for the victims.
The incident happened after midnight, and the cause of the stampede was not immediately clear. Videos circulating on social media showed large numbers of ultra-Orthodox Jews packed together in tight spaces.
A 24-year-old witness, identified only by his first name Dvir, told the Army Radio station that “masses of people were pushed into the same corner and a vortex was created.” He said a first row of people fell down, and then a second row, where he was standing, also began to fall down from the pressure of the stampede.
“I felt like I was about to die,” he said.
Zaki Heller, spokesman for the Magen David Adom rescue service, said 150 people had been hospitalized and confirmed there had been some deaths.
Heller told the station “no one had ever dreamed” something like this could happen. “In one moment, we went from a happy event to an immense tragedy,” he said.
Photos from the scene showed rows of wrapped bodies.
The Israeli military said it had dispatched medics and search and rescue teams along with helicopters to assist with a “mass casualty incident” in the area. It did not provide details on the nature of the disaster.
It was the first huge religious gathering to be held legally since Israel lifted nearly all restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic. The country has seen cases plummet since launching one of the world’s most successful vaccination campaigns late last year.
Health authorities had nevertheless warned against holding such a large gathering.
But when the celebrations started, the Public Security Minister Amir Ohana, police chief Yaakov Shabtai and other top officials visited the event and met with police, who had deployed 5,000 extra forces to maintain order.
Ohana, a close ally of Netanyahu, thanked police for their hard work and dedication “for protecting the well-being and security for the many participants” as he wished the country a happy holiday.
Netanyahu is struggling to form a governing coalition ahead of a Tuesday deadline, and the national tragedy is sure to complicate those efforts.
The latest data reveals that over 90 per cent of COVID-19 cases in Ontario are caused by a variant of concern, with almost all being the B.1.1.7 variant first identified in the U.K.
New modeling numbers show that while hospitalizations due to COVID-19 are levelling off, the number of patients in ICU with COVID-related critical illnesses is expected to continue rising.
ICU occupancy surpassed 800 around April 20 and under the best case scenario, the modelling suggests the numbers may come down to about 500 by the end of May. This is still not low enough to restart non-emergency surgeries for some time.
Dr. Adalstein Brown said that the number of patients in ICU was already still high as a result of the second wave when the third wave of the pandemic hit.
“It’s this occupancy of our Intensive Care Units which is such a significant threat currently to our health system,” he said.
“Our healthcare system is no longer functioning normally. We’re taking the most critically ill patients, we’re putting them in helicopters and in ambulances and moving them across the province because we’re searching for beds.”
The cumulative pandemic-related backlog of surgeries now stands at over 250,000 cases and officials say it poses an “enormous challenge.”
Further exposing the strain on the healthcare system is the fact that there has been a “dramatic rise” of patient transfers between hospitals. Dr. Brown says this is partly because some patients need to be sent to another hospital in order to get the care they need and partly due to intentionally moving patients to create more capacity in hospitals in the hardest-hit communities.
While the third wave appears to be cresting and cases are flattening, growth continues in hotspots. Peel Region showed the highest per cent positivity rate, with a seven day average of 18.1 per cent on April 24. Toronto followed at 12.4 per cent and York Region at 10.7 per cent.
Cases are decreasing faster than expected, but even in the best case scenario, cases could begin to rise in June.
In the chart below, the yellow line represents where Ontario sits currently, with a six-week stay-at-home order in place and a vaccination rate of about 100,000 people per day. The red line represents where the province would have been had the stay-at-home order not been implemented.
“So there has been a substantial control of cases due to the stay-at-home order,” said Dr. Brown.
The case counts will only dip to the levels seen in February under the best-case scenario, represented by the green line — which would require effective sick pay, a shorter list of essential workplaces, lower mobility and a continued focus on vaccinating high-risk communities.
The reproduction rate of the virus – the possibility that someone may pass on COVID-19 to another person is at 0.9, which means the province is seeing a deceleration in cases. But Dr. Brown said it was important to remember that case counts remain very high.
“If we start to relax public health measures, after say six weeks which would have started on April 8, you can see there is a potential for an increase in cases again which can be quite dangerous given that our ICUs have not yet started to empty out in any way,” said Dr. Brown.
The data also shows that Ontarians are respecting the stay-at-home order, but workplace mobility is still too high. Brown said “limiting essential workplaces and keeping sick workers at home will help control cases.”
Vaccination numbers continue to grow and more than 4.5 million doses have now been administered in the province.
Around 36.6 per cent on Ontarians have received at least one dose of the vaccine, with the largest demographic still waiting for the first dose falling in the under 50 category.
Dr. Brown reiterated that prioritizing hotspot communities for vaccinations will help control the virus across the entire province.
More than 2,000 people returning to Canada since the federal government brought in mandatory hotel quarantines have tested positive for COVID-19 and more than a quarter of them were infected with a variant of concern.
Data supplied to The Canadian Press by the Public Health Agency of Canada show that between Feb. 22 and April 22, 557 international air travellers tested positive for a variant of concern. Most of them, 518 cases, are the B.1.1.7 variant first identified in the United Kingdom, which is the dominant variant in Canada.
Another 27 passengers tested positive for the B.1.351 variant first identified in South Africa, and 12 tested positive for the P.1 variant identified in Brazil.
The viruses mutations become “variants of concern” when they are confirmed to spread more easily, cause more severe illness or be resistant to known treatments or vaccines.
Data is not available to show if those passengers are believed to have infected anyone after arriving, but at some point, all of those variants arrived in Canada via travellers, and then spread. There are now almost 95,000 confirmed cases of B.1.1.7, as well 578 cases of B.1.351 and more than 2,000 of P.1.
Those numbers have opposition parties and provincial governments begging Ottawa to take even more steps to keep travellers from bringing COVID-19 into Canada with them.
“I’m pleading with the federal government to stop all non-essential travel to Canada before new variants overwhelm our ICUs completely,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford wrote on Twitter April 24.
Last week, Canada did bar flights from India and Pakistan for a month after too many planes landed carrying infected people. But they are far from the only source.
Between April 7 and April 24, the public health agency identified 165 flights from 19 countries, with at least one passenger who later tested positive for COVID-19.
Forty-three of the flights came from India, 29 from the United States, 30 from Europe and 17 from the United Arab Emirates. Only one flight originated in Pakistan.
Epidemiologists agree the border measures should be strengthened, but say keeping COVID-19 from spreading requires more than just border closures.
“I think the border control restrictions and monitoring is only the beginning, it’s only one cure,” said University of Saskatchewan epidemiology professor Nazeem Muhajarine.
“It has to be complemented with a whole suite of measures. That alone is not going to actually amount to anything, really.”
He said rapid testing and good contact tracing is a must, as is swift action to contain outbreaks when they are identified.
Ottawa has required a two-week quarantine for international arrivals since March 2020, but only since Feb. 22, have air passengers had to spend three days of that in a quarantine hotel. As the variants arose, Canada also began requiring negative COVID-19 tests before boarding a plane, and from air and land border travellers upon arrival.
Another test is now required at day eight. It was day 10 until April 23.
Health Canada has not been able to provide data for how many passengers tested positive after leaving hotel quarantine. It also can’t provide test results for any of the 297 people who paid a $3,000 fine for failing to stay in the quarantine hotel.
Susanne Gulliver, an epidemiologist at NewLab Clinical Research in St. John’s, N.L., said part of the issue is that for all land travellers, and for most of the quarantine period for air passengers, they’re on their own.
Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea, all with much lower COVID-19 rates than Canada, require travellers to quarantine for two full weeks after arriving.
Gulliver said three days with supervised quarantine is not enough.
“It should be supervised for the entirety, for both their protection and the protection of the public,” she said, noting if someone gets sick in quarantine they can be monitored to ensure they get medical help if they need it.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau defends the government’s policies as among the strongest in the world, and says most of the travellers are Canadians who cannot be refused entry.
He also said less than two per cent of all Canada’s confirmed cases of COVID-19 are from travellers, or someone who came into contact with a traveller.
Muhajarine said however that a single case from a traveller, can infect several people in Canada which starts a cascade of community spread that aren’t labelled as travel cases once they’re passed on more than once.
Muhajarine and Gulliver both point to the Atlantic bubble as a place where restricting entry, even to Canadians from other provinces, worked well because they were accompanied by quick government action to lock things down if an outbreak occurred.
Gulliver noted quick action shut down an outbreak of the B.1.1.7 variant in Newfoundland in February. Nova Scotia implemented a provincewide lockdown Wednesday the day after a record 96 cases were reported in the province.
Australia is similar. Perth and a neighbouring region brought down the hammer for three days recently after just two cases were reported. Similar lockdowns have happened many times in Australia, which has confirmed fewer than 30,000 cases of COVID-19 overall, a rate of 117 for every 100,000 people.
Canada, conversely, has 1.2 million cases, a rate of 3,200 for every 100,000 people.
