Good evening, these are the top coronavirus headlines tonight:
Top headlines:
- Canada’s airlines are restoring routes to meet pent-up demand from customers who have not flown during the pandemic. But the resurgence in travel is colliding with labour shortages
- The pandemic fuelled more office romances from home, according to a new survey
- Pfizer, Moderna and other COVID-19 vaccine makers shift focus to boosters
In the past seven days, there were 432 deaths from COVID-19 nationally, down 12 per cent over the same period. At least 5,677 people are being treated in hospitals and 415 are in the ICU.
Canada’s inoculation rate is 15th among countries with a population of one million or more people.
Sources: Canada data is compiled from government websites, Johns Hopkins and COVID-19 Canada Open Data Working Group; international data is from Johns Hopkins University.
Coronavirus explainers: Coronavirus in maps and charts • Tracking vaccine doses
COVID-19 updates from Canada and the world
- Hospitalizations are up in Ontario and down in Quebec, while Quebec’s blood services organization says over a quarter of Quebec adults developed COVID-19 between January and mid-March of 2022.
- Toronto has ended the municipal emergency declared on March 23, 2020, which allowed the city to redeploy some employees to shelters, long-term care homes and other priority areas.
- Shanghai once again tightened its city-wide lockdown and mass tests are becoming routine in Beijing, as China continues its “zero COVID” campaign in contrast with most of the rest of the world.
Pandemic recovery
- In Edmonton and Alberta, as people return to public transit, so too does the need for services to deal with a greater number of assaults on buses and trains.
- A four-day workweek isn’t for everyone, but some businesses that tried it on a temporary basis are finding it makes for a happier, healthier and more productive work force – and are planning to keep it.
- How big is the rebound in air travel? On May 1, security employees screened a total of 121,000 people at the country’s eight largest airports. On the same day a year ago, they checked just 15,000. No wonder everyone’s feeling the massive labour shortage.
- While the pandemic was hard on brick-and-mortar book stores, which had to contend with forced closures and cancellations of book launches, it’s also spurred a rise in reading, giving authors, publishers and booksellers hope for the future of their industry.
- COVID-19 vaccine makers are shifting gears and planning for a smaller, more competitive booster shot market after delivering as many doses as fast as they could over the past 18 months.
More reading
- According to a new survey, more co-workers are reporting dating each other now than before the pandemic. Some experts think the intimacy of seeing into other people’s homes and lives while working out of the office bonded colleagues in different ways, leading to new relationships.
Information centre
- Everything you need to know about Canada’s travel rules for vaccinated and unvaccinated people
- When will COVID-19 be endemic? The four factors that will shape the virus’s future
- Wastewater is filling the COVID-19 data gap
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