TORONTO With warmer weather approaching, snowbirds are flocking back to Canada and some of them are finding ways to avoid spending three days in a government-mandated quarantine hotel. Business is booming for car services in American border towns where Canadian snowbirds are arriving to be driven across the border to their front doors. âTriple, probably quadruple the amount of calls, itâs crazy. The phones are ringing off the hook,â Tony Moore, owner and president of Buffalo Black Car Service in Buffalo, N.Y., told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview on Monday. âWeâre taking people straight to Toronto, right to their house,â he added.
PARIS, FRANCE The B.1.1.7 variant of the novel coronavirus does not increase the severity of COVID-19 compared to other strains, according to research published Tuesday that also confirmed its increased transmissibility. The variant, which was first discovered in the United Kingdom, is now the dominant viral strain across much of Europe, and previous studies had shown it was linked to a higher likelihood of death than normal variants. But two studies published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases and The Lancet Public Health journals found no evidence that people with B.1.1.7. experience worse symptoms or a greater risk of developing long-haul COVID-19 than those infected with different variants.
TORONTO Doctors have successfully completed the first double lung transplant in Canada for a man whose lungs were devastated by COVID-19. Tim Sauve, 61, became ill with COVID-19 in December when he noticed himself getting dizzy at home in Mississauga, Ont. In a matter of days he ended up in hospital, unable to breathe. âI was put on 100 per cent oxygen at that moment, and after that there was no turning back, they could not lower my oxygenâ Sauve told CTV Newsâ chief medical correspondent Avis Favaro. âAt that point it got very, very serious.â Sauve was transferred to the intensive care unit (ICU) at Toronto General Hospital in January with acute respiratory distress syndrome - or lung failure â caused by COVID-19. At that time, he was also put on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) which is a treatment that pumps the blood outside the body into an artificial lung to become oxygenated and then cycles it back into the patient, basica
Bilal Abdul Kader, president and founder of the As-Salam mosque in downtown Montreal, said his mosque has been serving meals during the holy month of Ramadan for 15 years. The Iftar evening meal, when Muslims break the daily Ramadan fast, has offered a chance for mosque members to come together and share food with the broader community and people in need, he said in a recent interview. Iftar has a religious aspect, a social dimension, and of course, a personal sense, because when Muslims share their meals with someone else, they get double the reward of the fast itself, Abdul Kader said.
OTTAWA The recent flood of COVID-19 vaccine doses into Canada is expected to wane this week, with a little more than 1 million shots scheduled for delivery over the next seven days. Canada has fielded vaccine deliveries from various pharmaceutical firms in recent weeks amid dramatic spikes in COVID-19 case counts across the country. Yet the Public Health Agency of Canada says the only shipment expected this week will come from Pfizer and BioNTech, which have been consistently delivering more than 1 million doses each week since March. While Canada received more than a million combined doses of the Moderna and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines last week, the Public Health Agency is not expecting any of either over the next seven days.