oil Oil crashed at -29 barrel. ontario Ontario reports 606 new cases of COVID-19 Monday / 31 deaths Ontario is reporting 606 new cases of COVID-19 Monday, including 31 new deaths. It brings the total number of cases in the province to 11,184, with 584 deaths and 5,515 resolved cases. The province says 164,840 COVID-19 tests have been completed since Jan. 15 and 3,799 cases are still under investigation. The last modelling data was released on Apr. 3 and showed that by Apr. 20, more than 1,200 people with the virus would be in intensive care units (ICU). However, there are currently only 802 patients in hospital, with 247 in the intensive care unit and 193 of those people on a ventilator to assist with breathing. Nine more patients suffering from COVID-19 in long terms care homes have died since Sunday. The province says a total of 249 deaths have been reported in long term care facilities. Since the beginning of the pandemic, 114 homes have declared an outbreak. As of Sunday, Hamilton had 321 cases, Halton Region had 380 and Niagara Region reported 366. cargill Worker dies, hundreds sick as Cargill temporarily closes Calgary meat-processing plant at centre of COVID-19 outbreak Facility south of Calgary linked to 484 confirmed cases A worker has died and more than 484 people are sick amid an outbreak of COVID-19 linked to a meat-processing plant near High River, Alta. The announcement that the Cargill plant south of Calgary will shut down temporarily came Monday, shortly before the latest numbers related to its outbreak, which is the largest in Alberta, were announced. Employees at the facility have accused the company of ignoring physical distancing protocols and trying to lure them back to work from self-isolation. The company said in a statement it was a difficult decision to close the facility. "We care deeply about our employees," said Jon Nash, Cargill Protein's North American lead.

cdc fu CDC’s failed coronavirus tests were tainted with coronavirus, feds confirm A federal investigation found CDC researchers not following protocol. As the new coronavirus took root across America, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent states tainted test kits in early February that were themselves seeded with the virus, federal officials have confirmed. The contamination made the tests uninterpretable, and—because testing is crucial for containment efforts—it lost the country invaluable time to get ahead of the advancing pandemic. The CDC had been vague about what went wrong with the tests, initially only saying that “a problem in the manufacturing of one of the reagents” had led to the failure. Subsequent reporting suggested that the problem was with a negative control—that is, a part of the test meant to be free of any trace of the coronavirus as a critical reference for confirming that the test was working properly overall. Now, according to investigation results reported by The New York Times, federal officials confirm that sloppy laboratory practices at two of three CDC labs involved in the tests’ creation led to contamination of the tests and their uninterpretable results. mutations Coronavirus’s ability to mutate has been vastly underestimated, and mutations affect deadliness of strains The most aggressive strains of Sars-CoV-2 could generate 270 times as much viral load as the least potent type. New York may have a deadlier strain imported from Europe, compared to less deadly viruses elsewhere in the United States