40 classic cars drove through High River to give thanks to those working on the front lines.

Alberta recorded one more death to COVID-19 and 81 new cases, Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Deena Hinshaw said Friday.

Human challenge studies could help researchers develop a COVID-19 vaccine faster, but the approach is incredibly risky.

An inmate at the Calgary Remand Centre has tested positive for COVID-19, marking the first time a case has been reported at an Alberta correctional facility.

Former Montreal Canadiens enforcer Georges Laraque's biggest challenge is trying to breathe clearly as he fights COVID-19 at a Montreal hospital. "The nights are the worst. I have fevers a couple times a night. I have to get up and take pills."

The men's curling world championship in Glasgow was cancelled Saturday morning to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Brad Gushue and his rink from Newfoundland and Labrador was going to represent Canada after winning the Brier.

The bonspiel took place in Edmonton March 11-14, starting the same day COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic.

Join our Facebook live on Thursday at noon with Dr. Roselyn Wilson a psychiatrist at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton’s Youth Wellness Centre. She'll talk with us about how COVID-19 is heightening anxiety in some young people. We'll talk about how to help the young people in your life through the pandemic.

Flattening the curve has been so successful and two areas around Hamilton — Brant and Haldimand-Norfolk — haven't had a new case of COVID-19 in three days, and Burlington has only had two.

The province says no one has to tell others if they get COVID-19. The same goes for businesses or landlords, should employees or tenants get sick. But should you tell?

Government restrictions designed to limit the spread of COVID-19 have virtually crippled Ontario's wine-making industry, as retail and wholesale revenues dry up but the costs of producing wine remains constant.

Fears that COVID-19 would spread at the Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre appear not to have materialized — at least not yet.

Curbside pickups offer a bit of hope after months of being shuttered by COVID-19, but while retailers are happy to start getting back to business some are raising questions of fairness and access to opportunity.

A Toronto law firm has filed to launch a class action lawsuit against a Niagara Falls long-term care home where 18 residents have died from COVID-19, saying the home had a pub night in the midst of the pandemic.

Sofina Foods plants in Burlington and Mississauga have each had an employee test positive.

Dr. Roselyn Wilson, a psychiatrist at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton’s Youth Wellness Centre, offers some tips to help young people cope with the stress and anxiety they face while on lockdown under COVID-19.

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FSI Briefs No 5, April 2020. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, governments have launched guarantee programmes to support bank lending to companies, especially small and medium-sized enterprises. This is essential to avoid a sharp contraction in bank credit that would exacerbate the pandemic's adverse impact. The design of such programmes needs to strike a difficult balance between responding promptly to the pandemic and maintaining a sufficient level of prudence. Key features of a sample of programmes (eg target beneficiaries, coverage of the guarantee, loan terms, length of the programme) reflect this tension. Incentives were created for the banks to join these programmes by exploiting flexibility in existing prudential requirements, while central banks have often provided liquidity support. Programmes are, however, subject to operational challenges and, ultimately, fiscal capacity limits.

FSI Briefs No 6, May 2020. Regulatory actions in the current circumstances need to focus on preserving banks' lending activity without jeopardising their solvency. This means that flexibility in capital requirements, including through the use of regulatory buffers, and capital conservation should go hand in hand. Basel III provides for automatic distribution constraints when capital falls below specific thresholds. In the current context, this may disincentivise firms from following authorities' recommendations to use capital buffers. Blanket distribution restrictions imposed through supervisory action may help address these disincentives to the extent that they are not linked to firms' individual capital positions and thus remove any possible stigma effect. Most authorities have undertaken initiatives in relation to banks' distribution policies in the Covid-19 pandemic environment. However, practices across jurisdictions diverge markedly as regards scope and stringency.

Banks' performance on equity and debt markets since the Covid-19 outbreak has been on a par with that experienced after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. During the initial phase, the market sell-off swept over all banks, which underperformed significantly relative to other sectors. Still, markets showed some differentiation by bank nationality, and credit default swap (CDS) spreads rose the most for those banks that had entered the crisis with the highest level of credit risk. The subsequent stabilisation, brought about by forceful policy measures since mid-March, has favoured banks with higher profitability and healthier balance sheets. Less profitable banks saw their long-term rating outlooks revised to negative. And the CDS spreads of the riskiest banks continued increasing even through the stabilisation phase.

David Dowdy, associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, will deliver the presentation “Simple Principles for Interpreting Complex Models: How to Make Sense of COVID-19 Projections,” at 4 p.m. via Zoom webinar on Thursday, April 30, as the next presentation in its Dean’s Lecture Series: Perspectives on the Pandemic.

The College of Health and Human Development will host M. Daniele Fallin, Sylvia and Harold Halpert Professor in Mental Health and chair of the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, at 4 p.m. via Zoom Webinar on Thursday, May 7, for the next presentation in its Dean’s Lecture Series: Perspectives on the Pandemic. This presentation, “Mental Health and the COVID Pandemic,” will summarize recent findings on the psychological effects of the pandemic, as well as offer some strategies for prevention and intervention as the pandemic, and its after-effects, continue.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues around the world, countries are extending periods of national lockdown and increasing the need for people to stay home. AppleInsider has compiled a list of free resources, apps, tools, and services that are still available to use while social distancing.

Early Thursday morning, Apple announced it is awarding $10 million from its Advanced Manufacturing Fund plus manufacturing machinery design assistance to COVID-19 test kit collection equipment manufacturer COPAN Diagnostics.

It's not exactly surprising that with all of the uncertainty in the world, Apple decided that it couldn't provide useful revenue guidance for its fiscal Q3 ending in June. It is unexpected, however, that Apple felt confident in announcing a silver lining to the pandemic -- it expects to sell more Macs and iPads in the summer of 2020 compared to 2019.

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, May 7, 2020 / 10:48 am (CNA).- A Catholic nurse said the coronavirus pandemic has presented challenges she has never encountered before—and that a prayer life is critical to get her through her shift.

“If I don’t have my faith in me, I cannot give what I don’t have,” said Maria Arvonio, a registered nurse for almost 40 years and a board member of the National Association of Catholic Nurses. 

As the current night shift supervisor at Virtua Willingboro Medical Center in southern New Jersey—a COVID-19 “hot spot,” she says—Arvonio told CNA she and her colleagues were facing a new kind of disease.

Over the decades she has had experience treating previous diseases including the AIDS epidemic, before which nurses didn’t wear gloves. “I’m still standing—that is God,” she said.

Yet the new coronavirus pandemic is something unprecedented, she admitted. “It’s different in that it appears that no matter what we’re doing, it seems to just multiply,” she said.

As she treats COVID-19 patients, Arvonio told CNA that she leans on her prayer life to lead the team of nurses at the hospital.

“I cannot help those other nurses stand strong, if they look at me and I look afraid. Why would they want us to continue to work? I cannot show fear,” she said.

“I start my job with prayer. Before I even go into the workplace, I’ve already been either doing the rosary with someone, praying ‘Jesus, come and seal me in your most Precious Blood, Blessed Mother help me,’” Arvonio said.

Arvonio was one of several nurses to appear at the White House on Wednesday for National Nurses Day, and told President Trump of her experience treating patients in a COVID-19 “hot zone.” New Jersey has been one of the hardest-hit states by the virus, with nearly 132,000 confirmed cases and more than 8,500 deaths.

Treating the person, and not just the sickness, is part of the mission of nurses, she said at the event. “It’s not just our science, it’s our compassion.”

In an interview with CNA after her White House appearance, Arvonio said she pressed an official close to the President on the need for the administration to push for more access to COVID patients by hospital chaplains.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has reportedly been working on guidelines for restarting religious services as states begin to loosen stay-at-home restrictions. CNA reported that on April 28 and 29, officials from the White House domestic policy council and the CDC had discussed the matter with four Catholic bishops who are resuming public Masses.

New Jersey, Arvonio said, has allowed golf courses and liquor stores to be open, but Catholics do not have public Mass. “That’s a problem,” she said.

The spiritual needs of the COVID-19 patients are just as real as their physical needs, she said. As a board member of the National Association of Catholic Nurses, U.S.A., Arvonio says that organization’s mission is critical now more than ever, to emphasize caring for the spiritual needs of patients. 

In the case of one patient who was heading to hospice, a priest could only talk to her remotely, on Zoom.

“She was in tears, an elderly woman worried to leave on hospice because her priest wasn’t there to give her the last rites. This is wrong! This is our right as a Catholic!” Arvonio said.

For some hospitals, chaplains cannot administer the sacramental anointing because of a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) available for them. Yet, Arvonio said, she has seen staff wearing PPE in situations where it’s not necessary.

“Look at how we’re using our equipment and give it to the essential personnel, which is the priest,” she said. “We need him in the hospital more than ever.”

“We need to start thinking about getting the spiritual care back to these patients. They need their priests, they need their pastor.”

She has started making care packages for patients to provide something tangible in the absence of the sacraments; for one patient she assembled a care bag with holy water, blessed oil, and plastic rosaries. “I said ‘he’s not alone. God always has somebody for every person,” she said.

CNA Staff, May 8, 2020 / 12:30 pm (CNA).- A federal judge in Arkansas on Thursday upheld the state’s requirement that women obtain a negative coronavirus test before having an abortion.

Calling the decision “agonizingly difficult,” Judge Brian Miller for the Eastern District Court of Arkansas said the state’s testing mandate—which applies to all elective surgeries and not just abortions—is “reasonable” during the public health emergency and was not done “with an eye toward limiting abortions.

The judge noted that “it is undisputed that surgical abortions have still taken place.”

The abortion clinic Little Rock Family Planning Services had requested a temporary injunction on the state health department’s requirement that elective surgery patients obtain a negative new coronavirus (COVID-19) test result within 48 hours before the procedure.

Previously, the health department ordered a halt to non-essential surgeries on April 3 to preserve resources for treating COVID-19.

The Little Rock abortion clinic performed abortions while claiming they were offering “essential” procedures, and after the health department ordered them to stop on April 10, the clinic challenged the state in court. The diocese’s Respect Life Office noted that women were traveling to the clinic for abortions from nearby states such as Texas and Louisiana.

The clinic won its case for a temporary restraining order at the district court level, but the Eighth Circuit appeals court subsequently overruled that decision and sided with the state.

The April 3 directive was updated April 24 to allow for some elective surgeries provided certain conditions were met. Elective abortions were included in the “non-essential” surgeries that were allowed to continue on April 24.

These conditions included no overnight stays, no contact with COVID-19 patients in the previous 14 days, and a negative COVID-19 test for patients within 48 hours of the surgery.

According to the clinic, which asked for a temporary injunction, three women were seeking to obtain “dilation and evacuation” abortions but were prevented from meeting the state’s testing requirmenet. One woman said she was unable to get a COVID-19 test; another said the lab could not guarantee she would receive results in 48 hours. The third woman was unable to get an abortion in Texas, and drove to the Little Rock clinic; she was told the results of her test would not be available for several days.

In response, the state’s health department said that four surgical abortions had still been performed at the clinic between April 27 and May 1, with COVID-19 test results having been obtained within 48 hours of the abortions, and thus the directive was not an “undue burden” on women seeking abortion.

In his decision on Thursday, Judge Miller said that the pandemic is a serious threat, noting that at the time of the opinion more than 70,000 people had died in the U.S. from the virus including more than 3,500 people in Arkansas.

He said the case “presents the tug-of-war between individual liberty and the state’s police power to protect the public during the existing, grave health crisis,” and noted that the three women as well as others “are very troubled. There is a strong urge to rule for them because they are extremely sympathetic figures, but that would be unjust.”

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CNA Staff, May 8, 2020 / 12:30 pm (CNA).- A federal judge in Arkansas on Thursday upheld the state’s requirement that women obtain a negative coronavirus test before having an abortion.

Calling the decision “agonizingly difficult,” Judge Brian Miller for the Eastern District Court of Arkansas said the state’s testing mandate—which applies to all elective surgeries and not just abortions—is “reasonable” during the public health emergency and was not done “with an eye toward limiting abortions.

The judge noted that “it is undisputed that surgical abortions have still taken place.”

The abortion clinic Little Rock Family Planning Services had requested a temporary injunction on the state health department’s requirement that elective surgery patients obtain a negative new coronavirus (COVID-19) test result within 48 hours before the procedure.

Previously, the health department ordered a halt to non-essential surgeries on April 3 to preserve resources for treating COVID-19.

The Little Rock abortion clinic performed abortions while claiming they were offering “essential” procedures, and after the health department ordered them to stop on April 10, the clinic challenged the state in court. The diocese’s Respect Life Office noted that women were traveling to the clinic for abortions from nearby states such as Texas and Louisiana.

The clinic won its case for a temporary restraining order at the district court level, but the Eighth Circuit appeals court subsequently overruled that decision and sided with the state.

The April 3 directive was updated April 24 to allow for some elective surgeries provided certain conditions were met. Elective abortions were included in the “non-essential” surgeries that were allowed to continue on April 24.

These conditions included no overnight stays, no contact with COVID-19 patients in the previous 14 days, and a negative COVID-19 test for patients within 48 hours of the surgery.

According to the clinic, which asked for a temporary injunction, three women were seeking to obtain “dilation and evacuation” abortions but were prevented from meeting the state’s testing requirmenet. One woman said she was unable to get a COVID-19 test; another said the lab could not guarantee she would receive results in 48 hours. The third woman was unable to get an abortion in Texas, and drove to the Little Rock clinic; she was told the results of her test would not be available for several days.

In response, the state’s health department said that four surgical abortions had still been performed at the clinic between April 27 and May 1, with COVID-19 test results having been obtained within 48 hours of the abortions, and thus the directive was not an “undue burden” on women seeking abortion.

In his decision on Thursday, Judge Miller said that the pandemic is a serious threat, noting that at the time of the opinion more than 70,000 people had died in the U.S. from the virus including more than 3,500 people in Arkansas.

He said the case “presents the tug-of-war between individual liberty and the state’s police power to protect the public during the existing, grave health crisis,” and noted that the three women as well as others “are very troubled. There is a strong urge to rule for them because they are extremely sympathetic figures, but that would be unjust.”

GUS MACKAY was full of good intentions when he agreed to become Cricket Scotland’s new chief executive last October.

27,593 passengers departed from and landed at Berlin's airports Schönefeld and Tegel in April. That is just 1 per cent of air traffic in comparison to April 2019. 22,079 passengers flew from Tegel, and 5,541 from Schönefeld.

Dear Editor,I am beyond concerned that it has taken now for the minister of health to become alarmed that only 35 of 185 nursing homes in Jamaica are registered.

Dear Editor,The United States' debt is some US$25 trillion. This debt grew by US$1 trillion in 35 days (April 1 to May 5). The US will likely not be able to permanently stop quantitative easing (money creation). This level of debt is similar to the US debt after World War II, but the US is no longer the factory of the world.

Dear Editor,The COVID-19 pandemic has taken us all by surprise. There are currently approaching the 500 mark for number of COVID-19 cases in Jamaica. Due to the outbreak of this virus there has been a reduction in job availability as companies have closed to combat the virus and promote social distancing.Many believe that it has made life harder, but, newsflash, it has not rendered us useless.

AROUND five people a day are being seen at Covid hubs across Scotland as demand for the service declines.

OMEGA Diagnostics shares jumped 77 per cent after it announced it is part of the UK rapid test consortium working to jointly develop and manufacture an antibody test.

A BIOTECH veteran has hailed a Glasgow firm that claims to have discovered two separate potential treatments for Covid-19 patients for use before they are put on ventilators.

To say that amateur golf in Scotland has been slow to adapt to change is putting it kindly. But where the rise of the nomads, the Equality Act, the credit crunch and repeated faltering reform efforts have failed, perhaps Covid-19 will finally be the shock that thrusts the sector into a meaningful if seriously belated overhaul.

“It's not the end; it's not even the beginning of the end; but it is perhaps the end of the beginning”. Churchill's famous wartime speech after the battle of El Alamein in November 1942 was an ambiguous rallying cry. After all, by saying it was only the beginning, he was suggesting that there could be worse to come.

NEIL Mackay (“Johnson? Sturgeon? When it comes to coronavirus they are both the same”, The Herald, May 5) lambasts Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson for both taking an almost identical approach in their fight against Covid-19, somehow implying that this is in itself a fault.

YOU report (HeraldScotland, May 5) that Professor Neil Ferguson, one of the UK government’s key advisers on the current lockdown restrictions, has resigned after breaching the government (and his own) strong advice on the need for social distancing.

Ashkan Negahban, assistant professor of engineering management, and Satish Srinivasan, assistant professor of information science, will lead projects that help address the COVID-19 crisis, thanks to seed grants from the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences.

Source: www.timesofisrael.com - Saturday, May 09, 2020
Vegas fixture's work with exotic animals came to violent end in 2003 when he was attacked on stage, critically hurt, by a 400-pound white tiger

A Fin24 reader heading into retirement seeks the opinion of an expert on investing during the uncertainty of Covid-19.

Quantum machine learning, an emerging field that combines machine learning and quantum physics, is the focus of research to discover possible treatments for COVID-19, according to Penn State researchers, who believe that this method could be faster and more economical than the current methods used for drug discovery.

Where businesses are fighting to survive, agility is the name of the game, says Mignon Reynecke.

The currently unfolding coronavirus pandemic threatens health systems and economies worldwide....

In an effort to help mitigate the disruptive effects of the deadly COVID-19 virus, an interdisciplinary team of Penn State researchers are developing a novel methodology to analyze its spread and the impacts on policy to create better-prepared and more-resilient health care systems.

Penn State University Libraries has developed a curated guide to COVID-19 related resources for researchers, including ongoing research at Penn State.