On today’s CHMA daily news:
Council meeting tonight to discuss economic recovery;
New Brunswick’s contact tracing app gets the kibosh;
Backwoods dumping in Sackville;
Higgs on board for the Atlantic Bubble;
Three motor vehicle deaths in New Brunswick;
CHMA checks in with PEDVAC;
and the COVID update:
The province reported no new cases of COVID-19 on Sunday.
On Saturday, one new case was reported in a person in their 50’s with connections to the Manoir de la Vallee long term care home.
The province also reported on previous false positive case on Saturday, so the total cases have not changed since last week.
There are 27 active cases in New Brunswick.
Two people are in hospital, one in intensive care.
In Nova Scotia, officials reported their twelfth day with no new cases of COVID-19.
The province is reporting only one active case, but also that two people are in hospital. The reason for the discrepancy is not clear.
Internationally, the The World Health Organization says Sunday marked the largest single-day increase in coronavirus cases.
The W-H-O counted more than 183,000 new cases in 24 hours.
The UN health agency said Brazil led the way with nearly 55,000 cases and the U.S. next at over 36,000.
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Sackville Mayor John Higham and the rest of town council will convene for a special meeting tonight to discuss the response to COVID 19.
Higham says the special meeting will be focussed on dealing with the pandemic shutdown, and providing some public transparency on what’s being done and what’s planned.
AUDIO Higham 3
“This is all about where the town is at in terms of the recovery phase of COVID. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? What’s our budget situation? What are we looking at in terms of assisting with business recovery? It’s all about what decisions we have made, what decisions we’re at, where we go from here.“
Town CAO Jamie Burke says there will be a preliminary discussion on whether there is an interest in establishing economic recovery fund for local businesses.
Burke also says that Treasurer Michael Beal will be on hand to give the financial outlook for the town.
Burke says although the province has not advised the town of any changes to property tax revenues for this year, “2021 could be a much different year.”
Mount Allison University President Jean-Paul Boudreau is expected to present on the university’s operational plan for the fall, and efforts with recruiting and retention of students.
Mayor John Higham says the town is working closely with Mount Allison.
“We’ve tried to coordinate our efforts in terms of COVID preparation so that both the community and the campus will be fairly comfortable with the level of risk of the students returning and the school starting to thrive again.“
Town council will meet online for a virtual meeting tonight at 6:30pm.
You can find a link to a livestream of the meeting on the town’s website.
A Sackville man is raising concerns over garbage dumping in the woods on his property near Lower Fairfield Road.
Keith Carter says there are trails through his land used by people hiking, riding bikes, and driving ATVs. But they’re not the people dumping, says Carter. Rather, it’s people driving in truck loads of large items that they can’t get rid of without making a trip to Moncton.
Carter says he’d like to see the town have a place for larger items to be dropped off, so that people won’t feel the need to dump it in the woods.
“If you’ve got an old old bed mattress and stuff like that, what do you do with it after the pickup day? You know, do you store it out back of your house for another six months? Well, you know, like I can see saying, you know, there’s a place here to put it, there’s a charge to do this, but that’s, you know, at least it would make a spot that that people could drop stuff off.”
In the past Carter has returned dumped garbage to the owners if he can find a name anywhere in what’s been dumped.
We used to have a lot of trouble in there until I hauled it away here a few years ago and took it back to their lawns and then they didn’t like that. It wasn’t much fun to have it all come back. So that was better than calling the cops or doing anything. You know, that’s that’s how we cured the problem. Now it’s starting again, they’re starting to dump again. Like, I suppose those fellas have forgotten about it and the newer, the younger people don’t understand. So they got a whole bunch of junk in their truck, so they drive in there and throw it out.
This time around, Carter found no names. So now he’s considering putting a chain across the access to his property.
Carter says he doesn’t want to limit access to ATV drivers, but he may have no choice.
“That’s why people have gates up on their properties. Just for that reason. People won’t go and take it to a dump site. And if the town had a place that they could take it to, they’d a lot sooner haul it into town than way back in the woods.“
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Chief Medical Officer of Health Jennifer Russell says the proposal for an Atlantic bubble is coming about because of decreasing risks across the country.
Russell said public health officials are still working on details around what would happen in the case of an outbreak somewhere within the bubble.
Premier Blaine Higgs says tourism-focussed businesses should be planning for an early July bubble opening, even though talks are still underway about how it will work.
Higgs says the premiers intend to make an announcement in a very short period of time.
We want to be in a position that we all have the same rules. We all can move up together. And I just feel it sends a great message for us to be working together to restart, in an additional way, our economy here in the Atlantic region.
Higgs says the goal is to fully harmonize rules with other provinces, which could mean making changes to New Brunswick’s own rules.
Higgs says he also hopes to be able to open up to the rest of the country sometime in mid to late July.
At Friday’s press conference, Higgs also said the federal government has put the brakes a New Brunswick-made contact tracing app.
Oh, yes. I guess I got clarification that there’s one app and it’s a national one. And it would seem at this time that, you know, which is concerning, despite all the great work that our people have done internally here, the folks that we’re working diligently to get up and running quicker… You know, it’s kind of stopped until we have access to to Google or Apple. And the idea, I guess, is we felt we could get up and running sooner. We felt we could get into a position and be able to supply a national app. So we all agreed that it was, it needed to be an app that would allow information sharing. It needs to be one that met all the criteria for privacy. And as long as it had that, that capability, then what difference did it really make? But the federal government have chosen an app they have there. They’re going to pay for it. I just hope we can expedite it as quickly as we felt we could otherwise.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Thursday a voluntary mobile app, now ready for testing in Ontario, to alert Canadians who may have been exposed to a person infected with COVID-19.
Alberta has had a voluntary contact tracing app up and running since early May, though the app has received criticism for technical issues.
As of Saturday, Alberta Health said its ABTraceTogether app has over 200,000 registered users, or about five per cent of the province’s population.
A man has died following a two-vehicle collision on Highway 2 in Dumfries, about 50 kilometres west of Fredericton.
RCMP say they responded to a collision between a transport truck and a construction safety truck on Highway 2 on Thursday.
Police believe the transport truck collided with the back of the safety truck that was parked along the side of the highway at a construction site.
The driver of the transport truck died at the scene.
The occupant of the safety truck was taken to hospital with what are believed to be non-life-threatening injuries.
Outside Quispamsis, two more people died in a single vehicle crash in the wee hours of Thursday morning.
Police say they found a nineteen-year-old and one twenty-year-old dead at the scene of the crash.
Both accidents are under investigation.
And finally today on the CHMA daily news, in case you missed it last week, CHMA checks in on PEDVAC — the Port Elgin community centre and service hub — to find out how they have been weathering the pandemic.
CHMA Daily News is hosted Mahalia Thompson-Onichino, and produced by Erica Butler, with occasional contributions from Bruce Wark, Geoff de Gannes, and James Anderson.
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