Canada’s chief public health officer issued a pre-weekend warning to young people to be cautious to prevent the spread of COVID-19 after an uptick in cases, largely among people in their 20s and 30s.
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Canada’s chief public health officer issued a pre-weekend warning to young people to be cautious to prevent the spread of COVID-19 after an uptick in cases, largely among people in their 20s and 30s.
Dr. Theresa Tam says there’s a worrisome trend of rising infections among people aged 20 to 39. She noted that less than one per cent of Canadians have been infected, which means the population remains highly susceptible to getting sick.
Tam said the peak of new daily cases arrived in early May, when the average daily case count was 1,800. That number fell to 273 in early July but has crept back up to 487 in the last seven days.
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Federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu has urged Canadians to ask themselves before going out this weekend: “Is what I’m about to do worth the risk?”
Hadju on Friday said the government needs to do a better job of tailoring its public health messaging to younger Canadians. She said her department is working on new language and new ways to connect with an age group the government often struggles to reach.
“I have had a pit in my stomach that I haven’t felt quite frankly since February or March when we saw our numbers start to surge,” she said.
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Hadju said the federal government has launched an online tool to help Canadians evaluate the risks of various activities and behaviours, which will be integrated with the COVID-19 tracing app now in the beta testing phase. The government also has posted online reminders of the risk level for certain behaviours.
More than 15.8 million people have been reported to be infected by the novel coronavirus globally and 638,271 have died, according to a Reuters tally. Infections have been reported in more than 210 countries and territories since the first cases were identified in China in December 2019.
In the United States, a world-leading 4.1 million cases have been confirmed and more than 145,000 people have died from COVID-19.
“We have to change our behaviour now, before this virus completely moves back up through the north,” said Dr. Deborah Birx, who is with the White House coronavirus task force.
“This first wave that we see now across Florida, Texas, California and Arizona began with under-30-year-olds, many who were asymptomatic and didn’t know they were spreading it,” she said.
Texas was approaching 400,000 cases on Friday, while Florida passed that mark, health officials said.
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Recovering from even mild coronavirus infections can take at least two to three weeks, according to a study published Friday and led by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
They surveyed 274 patients in several states who tested positive for the virus. After three weeks of having symptoms, about one-third of middle-aged adults had not fully recovered, and for those 50 and older, the rate was almost half. Patients with chronic illness, especially obesity, were more likely to have lingering symptoms.
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