Tag Archives: essential workers

Some COVID-positive essential workers to continue working in Canada’s Quebec -minister

(Reuters) – Quebec, the second most populous Canadian province, has “no choice” but to allow some essential workers to continue working even after testing positive for COVID-19 to prevent staff shortages from impeding its healthcare services, Health Minister Christian Dube said Tuesday.

Quebec, which has been setting daily records since the Omicron variant started a new wave of rapidly rising infections, recorded 12,833 new cases on Monday – the highest one-day count of any region in Canada during the pandemic.

“Omicron’s contagion is so exponential, that a huge number of personnel have to be withdrawn – and that poses a risk to the network capacity to treat Quebecers,” Dube told reporters at a briefing.

“We made the decision that under a certain condition positive staff will be able to continue working according to a list of priority and risk management,” he said, adding that more information would be provided in the coming days.

Dube said Quebec would also offer a third dose of a COVID-19 vaccine to everyone above the age of 18 from Jan. 4.

Last week, Quebec ordered bars, gyms and casinos to shut and directed people to work only from home. It also limited the size of gatherings at private homes and restaurants to six people.

(Reporting by Ismail Shakil in Bengaluru; Editing by Alistair Bell)

British army to start driving tankers as queues for fuel continue

By Guy Faulconbridge

LONDON (Reuters) -British soldiers will start driving tankers to replenish empty pumps, as drivers queued again for fuel after days of shortages, despite Prime Minister Boris Johnson saying the situation was improving.

Britain has been gripped by a rush of panic-buying for almost a week that has left pumps dry across major cities, after oil companies warned they did not have enough tanker drivers to move petrol and diesel from refineries to filling stations.

Business minister Kwasi Kwarteng said 150 soldiers had been mobilized, and would be driving tankers within a few days.

“The last few days have been difficult, we’ve seen large queues. But I think the situation is stabilizing, we’re getting petrol into the forecourts. I think we’re going to see our way through this,” Kwarteng said.

Johnson has sought to quell concerns, saying supplies were returning to normal while also urging people not to panic buy.

A shortage of around 100,000 drivers has sown chaos through supply chains and raised the specter of empty shelves and price increases at Christmas.

Asked if he could guarantee that there would not be problems in the run-up to the busy retail period, Kwarteng said: “I’m not guaranteeing anything. All I’m saying is that, I think the situation is stabilizing.”

By the early morning rush hour there were already long queues of cars in and around London and on the busy M25 orbital motorway circling the capital. Signs were up at some sites announcing no fuel was available.

The gridlock has sparked calls for doctors, nurses and other essential workers to be given priority access to fuel, a move Johnson has resisted.

Industry groups said the worst of the shortages seemed to be in London, the southeast and other English cities. Fights have broken out as drivers jostled.

The Petrol Retailers Association (PRA), which represents independent retailers who account for about two-thirds of all the 8,380 UK filling stations, said on Tuesday 37% its members’ stations were out of fuel.

The shortages have added to an air of chaos in the world’s fifth-largest economy, leaving gaps on supermarket shelves. A spike in European wholesale natural gas prices has also tipped energy companies into bankruptcy.

Britain left the EU single market at the start of this year, preventing haulers from recruiting drivers in the bloc. To tackle the shortage, the government has said it will issue temporary visas to 5,000 foreign drivers, a measure it had previously ruled out.

“What we want to do is make sure that we have all the preparations necessary to get through until Christmas and beyond, not just in supplying the petrol stations but all parts of our supply chain,” Johnson said.

Haulers, petrol stations and retailers say there are no quick fixes as the shortfall of drivers is so acute, and transporting fuel demands training and licensing. European drivers may also be reluctant to take up the visa offer, which only lasts until Dec. 24.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Writing by Kate Holton; Editing by Michael Holden and Peter Graff)

Canada to demand negative COVID tests from people returning across U.S. land border

By David Ljunggren

OTTAWA (Reuters) – Canada will step up its fight against COVID-19 by obliging citizens returning home over land from the United States to show they do not have COVID-19, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Tuesday.

Everyone arriving by air already has to prove they tested negative within the previous 72 hours and this rule is being expanded to land crossings starting on Feb. 15, Trudeau said.

Although non-essential travel between the two nations is banned, hundreds of thousands of Canadians have second homes in the United States, and Ottawa is obliged to allow them to return if they wish. People who arrive without test results can be fined C$3,000 ($2,360).

The measure only affects around 5% of returning Canadians because the majority arrive by air.

“We’re using every tool in the toolbox to get us all through this crisis,” Trudeau told reporters. Essential workers such as truck drivers are exempt from the new rules.

Canada has recorded a total of 20,835 deaths and 808,120 cases of COVID-19. Many provinces reimposed restrictions to combat a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic and as a result the number of new daily cases over the last week fell to around 3,500 from 8,000 in early January.

“This is gratifying progress,” chief medical officer Theresa Tam told reporters.

Trudeau also promised the supply of vaccines from Pfizer Inc and Moderna Inc would ramp up next week.

His Liberal government has been attacked by critics over the slow pace of vaccinations, caused in part by a temporary reduction in supplies from Pfizer.

Separately, officials said Canada would allow a sixth dose to be taken from each vial of Pfizer’s vaccine rather than the originally intended five.

They told reporters that six doses could be extracted provided a special syringe was used, mirroring moves taken by the United States and some European nations.

($1=1.2704 Canadian dollars)

(Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Marguerita Choy and Mark Heinrich)

U.S. asked to prioritize frontline essential workers as distribution of Moderna shots begins

By Rajesh Kumar Singh and Carl O’Donnell

(Reuters) – An advisory panel on Sunday recommended U.S. frontline essential workers and people 75 and older should be next in line to get inoculated as the distribution of Moderna Inc’s vaccine, the second approved coronavirus vaccine, began across the country.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted 13 to 1 to recommend 30 million frontline essential workers, which include first responders, teachers, food and agriculture, manufacturing, U.S. Postal Service, public transit, and grocery store workers, have the next priority for the vaccines.

In all, the move would make 51 million people eligible to get inoculated in the next round. It was not immediately clear when the next round would begin.

About 200 million people including non-frontline workers such as those in media, finance, energy and IT and communication industries, persons in the 65-74 age group, and those aged 16-64 years with high-risk conditions should be in the ensuing round, the panel recommended.

States, which are the ones distributing shots to their residents, will use the advisory panel’s guidelines to decide on how to allocate the vaccines while supplies are scarce.

Inoculation against the disease is key to safely reopening large parts of the economy and reducing the risks of illness at crowded meatpacking plants, factories and warehouses. However, confusion has broken out over who exactly is considered essential during a pandemic.

Ahead of the vote, many companies and industry groups had been lobbying to get their U.S. workers in line to receive the vaccines immediately after healthcare professionals and long-term care facility residents.

Meanwhile, trucks of FedEx Corp and United Parcel Service Inc started picking up the doses from warehouses for deliveries to hospitals and other sites.

Vials of Moderna’s vaccine were filled in pharmaceutical services provider Catalent Inc’s facility in Bloomington, Indiana. Distributor McKesson Corp is shipping doses from facilities in places including Louisville, Kentucky, and Memphis, Tennessee – close to air hubs for UPS and FedEx.

Both FedEx and UPS said the shipments were running smoothly and everything was going exactly as planned.

Separately, U.S. health officials are monitoring the new strain of COVID-19 emerging in the United Kingdom, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said on Sunday, adding that any mutation shows people must keep protecting themselves from the novel coronavirus while awaiting vaccination.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and scientists announced on Saturday that the new virus strain had led to spiraling infection numbers, tightening the COVID-19 restrictions for London and nearby areas and disrupting the Christmas holiday plans of millions of people.

The variant, which officials say is up to 70% more transmissible than the original, has prompted concerns about a wider spread. Several European countries, including Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands, said they were taking measures to prevent people arriving from Britain, including bans on flights and trains.

The distribution of Moderna’s vaccine to more than 3,700 locations in the United States will vastly widen the rollout started last week by Pfizer Inc and German partner BioNTech SE.

U.S. COVID-19 vaccine program head Moncef Slaoui said it was most likely the first Moderna vaccine shot, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration on Friday, would be given on Monday morning.

“We look forward to the vaccine. It’s going to be slightly easier to distribute because it doesn’t require as low (a) temperature as Pfizer,” Slaoui said on CNN.

The U.S. government plans to deliver 5.9 million Moderna shots and 2 million Pfizer shots this week.

Data from CDC shows 2.84 million doses have been distributed and 556,208 shots administered thus far.

The start of delivery for the Moderna vaccine will significantly widen availability of COVID-19 vaccines as U.S. deaths caused by the respiratory disease have reached more than 316,000 in the 11 months since the first documented U.S. cases.

Some states are choosing to use Moderna’s shots for harder-to-reach rural areas because they can be stored for 30 days in standard-temperature refrigerators. Pfizer’s must be shipped and stored at minus 70 Celsius (minus 94 Fahrenheit) and can be held for only five days at standard refrigerator temperatures.

Initial doses were given to health professionals. Programs by pharmacies Walgreens and CVS to distribute the Pfizer vaccine to long-term care facilities are expected to start on Monday.

(Reporting by Rajesh Kumar Singh in Chicago and Carl O’Donnell in New York; Additional reporting by Idrees Ali in Washington; Editing by Lisa Shumaker, Sonya Hepinstall and Daniel Wallis)

Constant fireworks frazzle nerves in U.S. city that never sleeps

By Barbara Goldberg

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Complaints are skyrocketing about thundering fireworks exploding over otherwise quiet U.S. neighborhoods, fraying nerves already frazzled by COVID-19 lockdown restrictions.

Even in the city that never sleeps, weary New Yorkers in the first half of June lodged a one-hundredfold increase in complaints compared to the year-ago period, of explosions that begin before sundown and rattle windows into the morning. The city’s 311 hotline received 2,492 fireworks complaints from June 1-16, up from just 25 in the same period in 2019.

The pyrotechnics occur almost nightly across the five boroughs of New York, once the U.S. epicenter of coronavirus infections, which recently achieved the nation’s lowest rate of virus spread.

“We have been terrorized by the fireworks for weeks now,” said Tanya Bonner, a government policy consultant in her 40s who lives in upper Manhattan, where Columbia University’s athletics complex had been converted into a COVID-19 field hospital.

“It is very bad up here. This area also has many essential workers – and they need rest.”

Bonner, who suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure and asthma and must leave her apartment windows open, said she can sleep only by turning her television volume “way up” even though “the fireworks happen so close to my window that it is impossible to drown it out.”

To get some shuteye, another upper Manhattan resident said she closes all windows and muffles the blasts by turning on a noisy air conditioner, a fan, a white noise machine and screwing in some tight-fitting earplugs.

“Fireworks are illegal in New York City,” New York Police Detective Sophia Mason responded in an email. But neighboring New Jersey legalized some fireworks in 2017.

From Jan. 1 through June 14, the New York Police Department has seized fireworks on 26 occasions, made eight arrests, issued 22 criminal court summonses, and responded to 2 fireworks-related injuries, Mason said.

In Massachusetts, which has the country’s strictest prohibitions against fireworks, police blamed a spike in complaints in Boston and other municipalities on a stretch of warmer weather after months of stay-at-home orders.

“It’s just been months now of young people being inside, being bored,” said Lieutenant Sean Murtha of the Worcester Police Department, roughly 47 miles (76 km) west of Boston.

“It’s been a stressful time for everybody, an oppressive time,” said Murtha, who noted recent reports of gunshots that turned out to be fireworks were double the five-year average, totaling 27 in May, the most recent data available.

In upstate New York, Syracuse residents said they were being pushed to the brink by the pyrotechnics and more than 530 have signed a petition demanding Mayor Ben Walsh “crack down on constant fireworks” that have been booming since May.

“These are not merely a nuisance, but extremely traumatic for service members with PTSD,” Scott Upham Jr., a Syracuse resident who started the petition, said on Change.org.

Others said the noise was particularly bothersome for people with autism and family pets and worried that the fireworks create a fire hazard.

Mayor Walsh did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

(Additional reporting by Aleksandra Michalska; Editing by Richard Chang)

New Yorkers sing ‘Lean on Me’ to honor essential workers during coronavirus pandemic

By Aleksandra Michalska

(Reuters) – It starts as it has around the world with people leaning out of windows and standing on balconies clapping, cheering and banging pots and pans to honor essential workers still operating during the coronavirus pandemic.

And then a rousing collective rendition of the Bill Withers 1972 song “Lean on Me” begins.

“It’s amazing,” said Robert Hornsby, director of fundraising at the Peace of Heart Choir non-profit in New York City, after he had finished playing the song from his window in Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

“The amount of energy that we’ve received, and the amount of energy that we’re giving, has really lifted the spirits of New Yorkers, and we hope people across the nation, too.”

Organizers of the “New York Sings Along” event said the goal was to boost morale and honor all workers on the front lines battling the COVID-19 pandemic, and to share the healing power of music while obeying social distancing rules.

Every week, the nonprofit picks one song, and plays it after the applause for essential workers on Thursday nights.

Last week, it was Frank Sinatra’s “New York” and next week, it will be the Ben E. King classic “Stand by Me.”

U.S. coronavirus deaths have topped 48,000, with the number of lives lost in April rising by an average of 2,000 a day, according to a Reuters tally.

Withers, a soulful singer best known for the 1970s hits “Lean on Me,” “Lovely Day” and “Ain’t No Sunshine,” passed away at the age of 81 from heart complications, his family had said earlier this month.

(Reporting by Aleksandra Michalska, Editing by Karishma Singh and Michael Perry)