Ottawa Declares State of Emergency Over Antigovernment Protests

OTTAWA — More than a week after a trucker-led protest against pandemic restrictions effectively shut down the city center in Canada’s capital, the mayor declared a state of emergency on Sunday.

The city of Ottawa said in a statement that the move by Jim Watson, the mayor, “reflects the serious danger and threat to the safety and security of residents posed by the ongoing demonstrations and highlights the need for support from other jurisdictions and levels of government.”

The measure is, however, largely symbolic. It did not give the city’s police any additional power to move several hundred trucks and personal vehicles off the streets near Parliament, and provincial regulations limit the city to acting within its current laws when dealing with the demonstration.

It came after protesters in Ottawa and other cities across Canada took to the streets on Saturday for the second weekend in a row to continue demonstrations against pandemic restrictions. The demonstrations that began with truckers critical of vaccine mandates have grown to include a range of other political causes, including opposition to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

While the police and officials braced for rowdy crowds and potential violence, the atmosphere of the demonstrations by midday Saturday, though loud, remained mostly peaceful and festive.

In Ottawa, despite frigid temperatures, a band performed on the street in front of Parliament Hill underneath a Canadian flag dangling from a large construction crane. Nearby, several inflatable bouncy castles were set up, and makeshift canteens throughout downtown dispensed food. At a municipal baseball stadium parking lot that truckers were using for staging and camping, three saunas were brought in.

On the streets, many people walking to the protest greeted one another with raised fists and shouts of “freedom.”

While the demonstrations have not devolved into serious physical violence, they have nevertheless paralyzed Ottawa’s downtown core with traffic, noise and repeated complaints of harassment.

“I’m receiving hundreds — and I’m not exaggerating — hundreds of emails telling me: ‘I went out to get groceries, I got yelled at, I got harassed. I got followed down the street, I’m so afraid that I can’t go out,’” Catherine McKenney, the city councilor for the area, said Thursday afternoon.

Throughout the area, many businesses have been closed for the past week, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in lost sales. Those that have remained opened have struggled to enforce provincial mask rules.

About 200 to 250 trucks remained downtown from last Saturday’s demonstration, their drivers frequently honking their air horns. Supporters have been delivering diesel fuel to the truckers, who have stacked firewood in parks and built a small wooden canteen building next to a canal that serves as a popular skating rink in the winter.

On Sunday, the Ottawa Police said on Twitter that they had begun arresting people bringing jerrycans of diesel fuel to truckers.

In Toronto, dozens of cars, pickup trucks and heavy trucks were parked along the city’s high-end shopping district downtown by midday, north of the closed-off legislature building area, with sounds of horns and shouts of “freedom” ringing out. Protesters held up signs of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and used hockey sticks as flagpoles for Canadian flags and Gadsden flags. People scaled a dump truck, and one man climbed into a tree near the Royal Ontario Museum.

The Toronto Police announced that they had arrested one man for assault with a weapon, and told the public to steer clear of the demonstrations.

Through GoFundMe, some of the organizers raised 10 million Canadian dollars, about $7.8 million, but the online service has only turned over about 1 million dollars of that. On Friday evening, the platform said in a statement that after speaking with the police, it would not release any more of the money.

“We now have evidence from law enforcement that the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation, with police reports of violence and other unlawful activity,” GoFundMe said.

By now, the Omicron wave of the coronavirus has crested in much of the United States. But the size of the wave, which broke records for national cases and hospitalizations, has given regulators and scientists an opportunity to better assess vaccine efficacy in children ages 6 months to 4 years old, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said on Sunday.

Dr. Gottlieb, who sits on the board of the vaccine maker Pfizer, said that he hopes key data expected on Friday will shed additional light on whether the federal government should grant emergency authorization for two doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine for children in this age group.

“We now have an opportunity to look at a much richer data set,” Dr. Gottlieb said on CBS’s “Face The Nation.” He did not specify what that data would reveal. Still, he emphasized that the toll Omicron took on children in particular gave Pfizer a stronger basis for comparison of those given vaccines and those not.

“Some got infected, hopefully some didn’t,” he said of the test group. “I think that’s what the data package is going to show, and I think it’s going to give a much clearer picture of” the vaccine’s efficacy against Omicron.

He said that the newer data would help illuminate results that had been less rich before the full Omicron wave had crested.

At the urging of the federal government, Pfizer and its partner BioNTech applied last week for authorization for two doses of its vaccine to children 4 and younger.

But results released in December did not show the hoped-for immune response in children ages 2 to 4. Children 6 months to 2 years old showed a comparable response to that of older teenagers and young adults.

The disappointing finding has led the companies to test a third shot in young children, but those results will not available for a few weeks. Still, in hopes of getting a jump start on the vaccination effort, the F.D.A. urged the companies to apply for authorization of two doses while everyone awaits data on the third dose.

The thinking is that if two doses are authorized and given, then children would be prepared for a third dose if and when research demonstrates that three shots prove fully effective.

That three doses will work is the working presumption of Pfizer and of some experts. Critics have argued that this strategy is short-circuiting the research process and that there is not yet clear evidence that a third dose will be make up for the inadequacies of two doses.

The full data on the trials have not been made public. But one person familiar with Pfizer’s research, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told The New York Times recently that children 6 months to 2 years old who received two doses became infected at a 50 percent lower rate than a placebo group, while children 2 to 4 years old became infected at a 57 percent lower rate.

Dr. Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general, said last week said no corners would be cut with Pfizer’s application for emergency authorization of the vaccine in young children. The application, he said, would “undergo the same independent, rigorous and transparent review process” that was used to clear the vaccine for adults. He also cited the role of the Omicron surge and its impact on children.

“Whether that changes the risk-benefit profile is what the F.D.A. will be assessing,” Dr. Murthy said. “But there has been developments since December on the data front.”

SEOUL — Family gatherings and traditional celebrations during last weekend’s long break for the Lunar New Year holiday may be taking a toll on South Korea. The nation recorded 38,691 new coronavirus cases on Sunday, setting another daily record, according to local health authorities. In the current surge driven by the highly contagious Omicron variant, South Korea has been reporting records week after week.

The country also recorded its one millionth known case on Sunday. While public health officials had predicted that cases would reach 30,000 a day by the end of the month, such figures have come weeks earlier. According to Our World in Data, South Korea’s average daily case count has increased 318 percent over the past two weeks.

The nation was able to keep the virus under control from the beginning of the pandemic through last year with its meticulous contact tracing system and social distancing campaign. As recently as last summer, South Korea’s total case count was only in the triple digits. It surely helped that the nation has fully vaccinated 85 percent of its population, according to the Central Disease Control Headquarters. About 55 percent of its population has received booster shots.

In response to the Omicron surge, the government recently shifted from trying to limit the total number of cases to focusing on decreasing severe cases through early detection and treatment.

“Although Omicron is twice as contagious” as the Delta variant that preceded it, said Lee Ki-il, a senior health official at a news briefing on Friday, “its fatality rate and rate of severe cases is a third of Delta’s.”

On Friday, the government announced an extension of its Covid restrictions until Feb. 20. Restaurants and public facilities must close at 9 p.m., social gatherings are limited to six people and masks are required both indoors and outdoors.

Only two of the 190 athletes and team officials who arrived at the Beijing airport tested positive for the coronavirus on Saturday, a steep decline from Friday when 20 were forced to isolate.

An additional two people tested positive among other attendees, a group that includes international journalists. There were 305 total arrivals.

All arrivals to Beijing must undergo a polymerase chain reaction, or P.C.R., test at the airport and then isolate in hotel rooms until the results come back a few hours later. Those who test negative are allowed to move freely throughout the Games’ so-called closed loop system, which restricts athletes and others involved with the Olympics to designated hotels and venues. The closed loop is designed to keep the virus from spreading to the rest of China, which has tried to eradicate Covid from its general population.

All Olympic attendees undergo a P.C.R. test every day. Of the 72,481 tests taken in the closed loop on Saturday, six people tested positive, including four athletes and team officials.

Those who test positive but do not require medical treatment must isolate in hotel rooms, and they are allowed to return to action only after registering two negative tests.

For the past few months, those Americans who had been lucky enough to find at-home coronavirus tests in stores had been kept from buying more than a few at a time so that stores could keep up with the surging demand.

But that is changing at nearly all CVS and Walgreens locations nationwide as of this week. A CVS spokesman, Matthew Blanchette, confirmed on Saturday that the pharmacy chain had increased its inventory of over-the-counter rapid test kits and removed all limits “on those products at CVS Pharmacy locations nationwide and on CVS.com.”

A Walgreens representative also said on Saturday that because of “improved in-stock conditions,” the company had removed its purchase limit of at-home tests at almost all its locations.

Both companies announced in late December that they would cap the number of tests bought in stores and online to keep up with demand as the highly contagious Omicron variant spread. CVS said it would allow the purchase of only six tests per person; Walgreens would allow only four. And still, many consumers regularly found empty store shelves when shopping for test kits.

The issue of testing shortages in the United States has persisted since the beginning of the pandemic, revealing just how much the Biden administration has struggled to meet demand as it has largely focused on getting people vaccinated.

Last month, the administration unveiled a website where Americans could order four free at-home tests per household through the Postal Service. The White House said that it had already mailed out tens of millions of tests. But the delivery schedule has been patchy, with some receiving their tests right away while others are still waiting.

In the latest federal effort to deliver more rapid tests, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said this week that Medicare, which covers roughly 60 million Americans, would provide free kits beginning in “early spring.”

Enrollees, most of whom are 65 or older, will be able to get up to eight tests per month, the same number covered for privately insured Americans as part of new requirements announced in January.

While the Omicron-driven surge may be showing signs of waning in many parts of the country, the tests could help Medicare recipients, some of the most vulnerable Americans, in possible future surges.

— Esha Ray

Elana Meyers Taylor is familiar with Olympic starts that go awry.

A partly torn left Achilles’ tendon prevented her from walking during the opening ceremony of the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. But weeks later, Meyers Taylor won a silver medal while wearing spikes modified by her husband, Nic Taylor, and enough tape to make a mummy proud.

“Afterward, it was just destroyed,” she said of her Achilles’, adding, “Fortunately, I was able to recover.”

In Beijing, Meyers Taylor, 37, is hoping to burst through another round of opening adversity in a similar way. Initially chosen as a flag bearer for the United States, she had to watch the parade of nations from isolation in a hotel room. Meyers Taylor had tested positive for the coronavirus shortly after arriving in China, so by Friday her pride at her distinction had been tempered by worries that her Games were over before they had begun.

By Saturday night, she was in tears for the right reasons: She said she cried after receiving her second consecutive negative test. That allowed her to leave isolation and get back to full training for the monobob event and the two-woman bobsled competition. Meyers Taylor, a three-time medalist, will be among the favorites in both events.

“I came here to compete in these Games, and I’ve been hauling my son around for two years, everywhere in the world,” she said. “I’ve put my family through all of this to make sure I could live this Olympic dream, and to finally get to do it and to be able to finally get out there — it feels, in some ways, a little bit of a redemption.”

The positive test had introduced a difficult set of circumstances for Meyers Taylor and her husband, an alternate for the U.S. men’s bobsled team, to navigate as they juggled parenthood, the pandemic and the Olympics.

The couple traveled to China with their 2-year-old son, Nico, who has Down syndrome and profound hearing loss, and Meyers Taylor’s father, Eddie Meyers. The family passed Covid tests after landing in China. Two days later, a stunned Meyers Taylor learned she had tested positive; she was moved to a room away from her family while awaiting her confirmation test.

They were allowed to stay in the same hotel while the others awaited their results, and so she could still breastfeed Nico. Once all four family members tested positive, though, they were taken individually to an isolation hotel. Meyers Taylor stayed by herself, two rooms from her family, to give herself the best odds of being cleared to compete.

She filled the six days by talking with her family members; by going through cramped, innovative workouts (she had a barbell delivered for weight lifting); and by pumping breast milk. “It seemed like the days went by pretty quickly, because I felt like I was busy all day,” she said.

Escaping isolation, though, has been bittersweet. Her family members are asymptomatic and remain isolated. Meyers Taylor plans to restart her regular training and pump breast milk to be delivered to Nico once a day. But her path to an elusive gold medal is still viable.

“I think about the journey and what it took to get here, and in some ways, that is a gold medal,” she said. “In some ways, just being able to get to the starting line is a gold medal in itself. But in other ways, yes, I still want that gold medal.”

A growing chorus of voices — from the prime minister of Denmark to President Biden’s former pandemic advisers — is calling for a change in approach to the coronavirus, to accept it as a part of everyday life to be managed, not a deadly scourge requiring lockdowns and stringent preventive measures.

That message has been resonating in the world of travel and among industry representatives, who frequently borrow a public health term to make their case to ease travel restrictions.

“When I use the word pandemic, I think of the two years where we sheltered in place, but endemic is very similar to what I’m doing now — traveling for business as an entrepreneur, but also for vacation and seeing friends and family that I’ve missed,” said Jennifer Wilson-Buttigieg, a co-president of Valerie Wilson Travel, a New York-based travel consulting company.

A possible shift in mind-set has given the travel industry in Europe and the United States a boost in recent weeks, as have the increasing numbers of travelers booking spring and summer trips.

In a bimonthly travel sentiment survey taken in mid January by Longwoods International, a travel market research firm, of 1,000 Americans who traveled for business or pleasure before the pandemic, 91 percent of respondents have travel plans in the next six months, and 25 percent said that the pandemic is no longer influencing their decision to travel.

In data recorded last week and to be released Tuesday, said Amir Eylon, president and chief executive of Longwoods International, 31 percent of respondents reported that the pandemic is no longer influencing their decision to travel.

This comes after domestic leisure travel had a strong year in 2021, rebounding well after extraordinary losses in 2020, according to the U.S. Travel Association, a trade group that promotes travel to and within the United States.

But in the United States, some experts say a shift in mind-set — however desired — is premature. The Omicron surge has begun to level off in some states, but case numbers and hospitalizations remain extremely high across the country.

But many Americans who are looking to book international travel this year are worried less about the virus itself and more about the prospect of getting stuck overseas, with a positive test result prohibiting them from flying back to the United States.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has also issued its highest level four “do not travel” warning for many popular destinations abroad, sparking hesitation among some consumers.

Like a tsunami, the Omicron variant of the coronavirus swept through New York City from December to January, swamping defenses that had been built over the past two years. Some epidemiologists estimate that 40 percent or more of residents were infected.

The extraordinary surge exposed understaffing problems at the city’s hospitals, particularly among nurses, to a degree unseen earlier in the pandemic. For several weeks, tens of thousands of patients were treated by health care teams severely depleted by illness and burnout.

Yet now, with Omicron receding rapidly and virus cases plummeting more than 90 percent from their recent peak, health officials are reaching an encouraging assessment: The city’s hospital system, although critically stretched, did not break. Experienced health care workers treated patients more effectively, and deaths were limited to a fraction of the number recorded during the virus’s first wave in 2020.

This was partly because Omicron proved to be less deadly than previous variants, with far fewer patients ending up in intensive care units. Moreover, vaccines protected millions of New Yorkers against serious illness, and new treatments became available in limited supplies.

From Dec. 5 to Jan. 22, city statistics show, 2,846 New Yorkers died of Covid-19, compared with 18,700 during the pandemic’s three-month first wave. About two-thirds of those who died amid the recent surge were unvaccinated, city data shows, even though the unvaccinated comprise a small minority of New Yorkers. As a result, according to the city, the death rate among unvaccinated New Yorkers was 17 times higher than it was among those who were vaccinated, after adjusting for age.

The Omicron wave nonetheless strained the city’s hospitals, but they proved resilient because health care workers, despite widespread exhaustion, had learned from hard-won experience in 2020 how to limit severe illness and death, officials and workers said.

They knew to avoid intubating patients when possible, having learned that many patients who are put on ventilators never come off. Instead, they relied on less invasive ways of providing supplemental oxygen and made better use of high-dose steroids to control inflammation. Hospital administrators activated prewritten emergency plans to open surge units, and consulted one another regularly to share advice or ask for reinforcements.

“Our hospitals did come under strain, particularly emergency departments, and — a little bit less so — our intensive care units compared to prior surges,” said Dr. Dave A. Chokshi, the city’s health commissioner. “But they held the line.”

Still, while many people hope that the waning of the Omicron surge is a turning point in the pandemic, the health care system’s gaps and shortages could prove far more devastating if another variant emerges that is equally contagious but more virulent, epidemiologists warned.

Clinicians also warn that the long-term toll of infection on millions of New Yorkers, including the constellation of post-virus symptoms known as long Covid, remains unknown.

Lata Mangeshkar, a beloved Indian vocalist who enthralled generations of Bollywood audiences as the singing voice behind many actresses’ performances, died on Sunday at Breach Candy Hospital in Mumbai, India. She was 92.

The cause was complications of Covid-19 after weeks of hospitalization, Dr. Pratit Samdani, a physician at the hospital, told Indian news outlets.

Ms. Mangeshkar leaves a legacy of tens of thousands of songs, mostly in Hindi but also in several other languages. She worked mostly as a playback singer — a vocalist who does not appear onscreen but records a character’s songs, which are later dubbed in.

Tributes poured in on Sunday, including one from Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

She was a revered figure in India and beyond, receiving the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest honor, in 2001. The Ministry of Home Affairs said that flags at government buildings would be flown at half-staff for two days.

Ms. Mangeshkar was known for her range — she could sing in four octaves — and her gift for singing in character, tailoring her voice and emotions to the actress she was voicing onscreen. She was the singing voice for generations of Bollywood actresses, from Madhubala and Meena Kumari in the 1950s and 1960s to Kajol and Preity Zinta in the 1990s and 2000s.

“Music is my life and God,” Ms. Mangeshkar said in the 2009 book, “Lata Mangeshkar…in Her Own Voice.”

Lata Mangeshkar was born on Sept. 28, 1929, in the city of Indore, in what is now the state of Madhya Pradesh. She was the oldest of five children born to Shuddhamati Mangeshkar and her husband, Pandit Deenanath Mangeshkar, a well-known classical musician active in Marathi-language theater. Her sisters Meena, Asha and Usha, and her brother Hridaynath, all of whom survive her, are also musicians.