Good evening, the coronavirus newsletter publishes Mondays and Fridays
Top headlines:
- Booster doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine for children between five and 11 years old were approved by Health Canada today
- When air travel, grounded by the pandemic, began to take off again, Toronto’s main airport had too few staff to handle it – and critics say a broken chain of command left no one accountable for fixing the airport chaos that ensued
- Customer behaviour during the pandemic veered from erratic to nasty. Does that mean the motto, “the customer is always right” no longer holds?
An increasing number of health agencies have changed how they're reporting data on the coronavirus. A look at the current numbers in Canada for reported cases, deaths from COVID-19 and for hospitalizations can be found here.
COVID-19 updates from Canada and the world
- Health Canada has authorized a booster dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children between five and 11 years old, chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam said today. As children head back to school soon, concerns have been bubbling about COVID-19 transmission in classrooms. And currently, vaccine uptake in that age group is much lower than in all older demographics, with 42 per cent of kids aged five to 11 vaccinated with two doses (compared to vaccine rates in other cohorts, which is higher than 83 per cent).
- Ontario doctors are advising people to keep up with vaccinations ahead of the fall, when illnesses including COVID-19 and influenza are expected to spread amid health system challenges.
- Quebec is launching a “massive” vaccination booster campaign to get ahead of the next wave of COVID-19, Premier François Legault said earlier this week, noting that a surge in cases is expected after students return to class and people start spending more time indoors.
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Pandemic recovery
- Once pandemic restrictions began to ease, demand for air travel rebounded. At the same time, it became immediately clear that the industry wasn’t ready to handle a sudden influx of passengers. As throngs of travellers headed to airports, airlines and the government agencies that screen travellers at security and customs checks were scrambling to hire and train new employees and recall those they had laid off during the pandemic, many of whom declined to return.
- Meanwhile, Air Canada says it planned to operate flights at 79 per cent of its pre-pandemic capacity this summer.
- Welcome to “hotel shrinkflation” – inflated costs for accommodations and a shrinking level of service, brought on partially because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And there are signs some standard prepandemic hotel perks may never come back.
- Across the country, the people working in customer service at many businesses – airlines, hotels, car-rental agencies, medical offices, grocery stores, restaurants, private clubs – are fed up with the treatment they’ve received from customers during the pandemic. “In the early days of the pandemic we all pulled together,” says Emily Jenkins, the UBC professor who co-led a survey conducted by the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) and researchers at the University of British Columbia. “People were banging pots and pans and celebrating the front-line workers in health care, food services etc. Then, over time, as fatigue of the pandemic set in, collective grieving of the life we once knew began, and anger became the overriding emotion.”
- Venture-capital funding in Canada fell to prepandemic levels in the second quarter this year as the tech downturn hit privately held companies, the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association said.
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Globe opinion
John Ibbitson: Canada’s health care system needs a shakeup as the status quo is failing
Globe contributors: To address Canada’s health care crisis, start by containing COVID-19
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More reading
First person: Starting a book club with my family during the pandemic helped us get through
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
Thank you for subscribing to our Coronavirus Update Newsletter. As the pandemic eases, we plan to wind this down and eventually cease sending, but have many other newsletters to keep you informed, including Globe Climate, Carrick on Money and Breaking News.
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