Coronavirus: What’s happening in Canada and the world on Tuesday

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus welcomed the announcement, which follows confirmation last month that Washington under President Joe Biden will remain in the Geneva-based agency. Former president Donald Trump criticized the agency and halted funding.

“We want to underscore the commitment of the United States to multilateralism and our common cause to respond to this pandemic and improve global public health,” Colin L. McIff, acting director at the Office of Global Affairs in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said at a WHO virtual meeting.

The meeting in Geneva aims to help fill a $27-billion US funding gap for the WHO-backed program, called the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator Facilitation Council, that is aimed at broadening global access to COVID-19 fighting tools.

The United States had previously been an observer to ACT.

The United States, the top donor to the WHO, has pledged $4 billion. WHO’s special envoy for the ACT Accelerator, Andrew Witty, a former GlaxoSmithKline CEO, said discussions on further support from the United States were ongoing.

In the same meeting Tedros expressed fresh concerns about vaccine inequity, noting that 90 per cent of countries rolling out COVID-19 vaccines are wealthy and that 75 per cent of doses have been deployed to just 10 countries.

South African Health Minister Zweli Mkhize who co-chairs the meeting, called these “alarming and disappointing numbers which we need to change.”

– From Reuters, last updated at 10:30 a.m. ET

What’s happening in Canada

As of 1:15 p.m. ET on Tuesday, Canada had reported 810,000 cases of COVID-19 — with 39,327 considered active. A CBC News tally of deaths stood at 20,884.

Health Canada has agreed with a request from Pfizer to recognize that each vial of the company’s vaccine includes six doses, not five, following an independent regulatory review.

The labelling change means that more shots can be squeezed out of each vial — and the company can ship fewer vials and still meet its contractual obligations to send a certain number of doses to its customers.

WATCH | How more doses can be extracted from Pfizer’s vaccine vials

Extracting six doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine from a vial instead of five is manageable with the right syringe and the right training, says Dr. Lisa Barrett, an infectious diseases doctor in Halifax. 3:19

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced that non-essential travellers entering Canada through the land border will soon need to provide proof of a negative COVID-19 test before arrival.

While border officers can’t legally deny entry to Canadians, those who show up without proof of a test could face fines of up to $3,000, Trudeau said.

The new measure kicks in Feb. 15, more than a month after the government announced air travellers will need proof of negative polymerase chain reaction tests — commonly known as PCR tests — three days before boarding their flights home.

Ontario is reporting 1,022 new cases and 17 new deaths on Tuesday, a day after the province announced a gradual lifting of stay-at-home orders.

The new cases are the fewest for the province on a single day, without data problems, since early November. The seven-day average of new daily cases rose slightly to 1,367.

There are now about 13,948 confirmed, active cases provincewide. The number of active cases has steadily declined since its peak at more than 30,500 in mid-January.

Three public health units will be the first to see the stay-at-home order, which was declared four weeks ago, lifted on Wednesday.

Other regions are staying in the grey lockdown phase for now, but the province is making some changes to the restrictions they face. Chief among them is that non-essential retailers will be allowed to open their doors with a 25 per cent capacity limit.

In Quebec, Premier François Legault is expected to provide an update at 1 p.m. ET today, following the reopening of non-essential businesses such as stores, museums and hairdressers on Monday. You can watch it live here.

The province reported 826 new cases and 32 more deaths on Tuesday. Along with new cases, hospitalizations are also trending downward, with 940 people currently in hospital, including 145 in intensive care.

In Atlantic Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador reported 30 new cases on Tuesday, its highest daily case count since March 25 last year.

Dr. Janice Fitzgerald, the province’s chief medical officer of health, is implementing a two-week “circuit breaker” for the St. John’s area starting midnight. The new measures include limiting gatherings to a maximum of 20 people and suspending all group activities, with all gyms and recreational facilities required to close.

Meanwhile, P.E.I. is reporting one new case, a person who was diagnosed while out of the province and will remain off-Island while recovering. Nova Scotia also reported one new case.

Here’s a look at what’s happening across the country:

– From CBC News, last updated at 1:15 p.m. ET

What’s happening around the world

As of Tuesday morning, more than 106.5 million cases of COVID-19 had been reported worldwide, with more than 59.4 million of those cases listed as recovered or resolved by Johns Hopkins University, which maintains a case tracking tool. The global death toll stood at more than 2.3 million.

In the Asia-Pacific region, a World Health Organization team has concluded that the coronavirus is unlikely to have leaked from a Chinese lab and is more likely to have jumped to humans from an animal.

WHO food safety and animal diseases expert Peter Ben Embarek announced that assessment Tuesday at the end of a visit by a WHO team that is investigating the possible origins of the coronavirus in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.

On the vaccine front, India’s government has ordered 10 million more doses of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine from the Serum Institute of India.

Meanwhile, Russia’s Sputnik-V has become the third COVID-19 vaccine to be approved by Pakistan for emergency use, the country’s health minister said.

In the Middle East, dozens of asylum seekers and foreign workers in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv lined up to receive their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine on Tuesday as part of an initiative to inoculate the city’s foreign nationals.

Iran has launched a vaccination drive, focusing initially on hospital intensive care personnel, as the hardest-hit country in the region awaits enough vaccines for its general population.

In Africa, Ethiopia has secured nine million doses of COVID-19 vaccines up until April and hopes to inoculate at least a fifth of its 110 million people by the end of the year, the health minister said.

In the Americas, U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris “virtually toured” a federally supported mass-vaccination site Monday in Glendale, Ariz. The drive-thru 24-hour facility at the State Farm Stadium is giving one COVID-19 shot about every 10 seconds.

Biden and Harris have promised to open 100 similar sites across the country in the coming weeks and have called on Congress to provide funding for even more. Biden has ramped up federal support for the facilities through the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Pentagon.

The president said he is ahead of pace to deliver on his promise of providing 100 million injections in the first 100 days of his presidency, saying, “I think we’ll exceed that considerably.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that more than 22 million doses have been given since Biden’s inauguration less than three weeks ago.

In Europe, Germany is planning to spend nearly 9 billion euros ($13 billion Cdn) this year to buy up to 635.1 million COVID-19 vaccines as part of the European Union’s procurement scheme and national deals.

Hungary will start vaccinating people suffering no chronic diseases with Russia’s Sputnik vaccine soon, the surgeon general said, becoming the first European Union country to use it.

Meanwhile, some countries are also ramping up measures to curb COVID infections. Travellers arriving in England face fines and even prison if they flout rules as part of a hotel quarantine policy designed to stop the spread of COVID-19 variants from the most at-risk countries, British health minister Matt Hancock said on Tuesday.

“We will be putting in place tough fines for people who don’t comply. This includes a 1,000-pound ($1,775 Cdn) penalty for any international arrival who fails to take a mandatory test,” Hancock told Parliament.

“Anyone who lies on the passenger locator form and tries to conceal that they’ve been in a country on the red list in the 10 days before arrival here, will face a prison sentence of up to 10 years.”

Sweden plans to restrict the number of passengers on long-distance trains and buses in an effort to prevent a pick-up in new COVID-19 cases and the spread of mutations of the virus that could be more infectious, the government said on Tuesday.

– From The Associated Press and Reuters, last updated at 10:30 a.m. ET