'A beautiful soul': Funeral held for baby boy killed in wrong-way crash on Highway 401
A funeral was held on Wednesday for a three-month-old boy who died after being involved in a wrong-way crash on Highway 401 in Whitby last week.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday announced that the state has put out a revised rule which follows a "symptom-based approach" to quarantining students, meaning asymptomatic children exposed to COVID-19 in classrooms could be sent back to school by parents.
"If somebody is symptomatic, of course they stay home. If there's a close contact, but somebody has not developed any symptoms -- you monitor them, you notify the parent," DeSantis said. "The parent always has the right to have their kids stay home, if they think that's in the best interest of the student and the family 100 per cent, we would not want to intrude on that. But if a parent has a healthy child, that child has a right to be in school."
DeSantis said the new policy recognizes that quarantining healthy students is "incredibly damaging" for students' educational advancement and disruptive for families.
Dr. Joe Ladapo, Florida's new state surgeon general and Department of Health secretary, said, "It's also important to respect the rights of parents as the governor described.
"We respect that some parents may be less comfortable sending their kid back to school after being exposed. And so the new rule allows for those parents to keep their children home for a period of time. And the new role also allows for parents who are more comfortable letting their healthy child return to school," Lapado said.
The decision has been criticized by school officials who are in favour of COVID-19 preventative measures such as mask mandates and additional quarantining.
"This rule is likely to promote the spread of COVID-19 by preventing schools from implementing the common-sense masking and quarantine policies recommended by the vast majority of health care professionals, including those here in Alachua County," said Alachua County Public Schools superintendent Dr. Carlee Simon in a statement. "The State is, in fact, doubling down on policies that may ultimately put students, staff and the entire community at greater risk."
With the spread of the Delta variant driving a surge of cases as the new school year opened, schools in some states have faced difficulties balancing COVID-19 prevention with differing statewide orders.
Alachua County is among those in Florida whose school systems have come under fire from DeSantis for defying the state's ban on mask mandates.
"We will be reviewing the new rules and any notifications we receive from the State with our legal counsel and medical advisors. In the meantime, we will continue to follow the masking and quarantine policies currently in place in our schools," Simon said.
Regarding the quarantining of students exposed, recent research has found that regular COVID-19 testing of all students and staff in schools can catch positive cases that symptom-based testing may miss.
As many as nine in 10 cases among students and seven in 10 cases among staff may be missed by conventional reporting mechanisms, according to research published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Network Open.
For the study, students and staff in three schools in Omaha, Nebraska, participated in a weekly PCR-testing program between November 9 and December 11 last year. Over the study period, nearly 2,900 self-collected saliva samples from 458 staff and 315 students with no symptoms were tested.
Among those, 22 students and 24 staff members tested positive, a higher rate than those identified through symptom-based testing strategies, the researchers noted. The case rate was 7% among students and 5.3% among staff in the weekly testing program, compared to 1.2% among students and 2.1% among staff using conventional reporting mechanisms. Cases detected even exceeded the infection rates reported at the county level.
The researchers said that the differences in community-case rates and those among students and staff in the weekly testing program suggest that the strategy may help mitigate school-based transmission risk.
A funeral was held on Wednesday for a three-month-old boy who died after being involved in a wrong-way crash on Highway 401 in Whitby last week.
There has been a "sophisticated" cybersecurity breach detected on B.C. government networks, Premier David Eby confirmed Wednesday evening.
Toronto police say a man was taken into custody outside Drake's Bridle Path mansion Wednesday afternoon after he tried to gain access to the residence.
U.S. President Joe Biden said for the first time Wednesday he would halt shipments of American weapons to Israel, which he acknowledged have been used to kill civilians in Gaza, if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders a major invasion of the city of Rafah.
Dakota Joshua had a goal and two assists and the Vancouver Canucks scored three third-period goals to claw out a 5-4 comeback victory over the Edmonton Oilers in Game 1 of their second-round playoff series Wednesday.
One of the Indian nationals accused of murdering British Columbia Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar says in a social media video that he received a Canadian study permit with the help of an Indian immigration consultancy.
Pfizer has agreed to settle more than 10,000 lawsuits about cancer risks related to the now discontinued heartburn drug Zantac, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the deal.
Quebec Premier Francois Legault is defending his comments about a new history museum after he was accused by a prominent First Nations group of trying to erase their history.
Independent U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a parasite in his brain more than a decade ago, but has fully recovered, his campaign said, after the New York Times reported about the ailment.
The stakes have been set for a bet between Vancouver and Edmonton's mayors on who will win Round 2 of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
A grieving mother is hosting a helmet drive in the hopes of protecting children on Manitoba First Nations from a similar tragedy that killed her daughter.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
A P.E.I. lighthouse and a New Brunswick river are being honoured in a Canada Post series.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.