TORONTO - Health Canada has authorized updated COVID-19 vaccines by Pfizer and BioNTech and by Moderna for use this respiratory virus season.

Moderna says it will manufacture vaccine doses for the Canadian market in its new facility in Laval, Quebec and syringes will be filled in Cambridge, Ontario.

News releases from both Pfizer and Moderna say the new mRNA shots will target the LP.8.1 variant, a descendant of Omicron that the World Health Organization was monitoring earlier this year.

Both Pfizer's vaccine — called Comirnaty — and Moderna's shot — called Spikevax — are approved for adults and children six months of age and older.

Green space helped protect the mental health of city-bound Canadians during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new study suggests, even as the number of people with depression surged. 

People living in greener neighbourhoods were less likely to be depressed in the first months of the pandemic, said the study published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One, with stronger benefits for those who weren't already depressed.  

That protective lifeline was also more pronounced for people with mobility issues or lower incomes, though only among those who weren't already depressed, the study said. 

"The protective effects during the pandemic could be because green spaces act as a refuge from financial and other stressors and the restorative and therapeutic effects of accessing nature," read the study, co-authored by university and federal public health researchers. 

TORONTO - When the COVID-19 pandemic hit five years ago, Canadian public health doctors, infectious disease specialists and epidemiologists were thrust into national fame through daily televised briefings and media interviews about measures to contain the spread of the virus. 

Doctors themselves were just learning about the new virus and emerging variants, and they were tasked with providing the latest scientific evidence to provincial and federal governments.

But government-imposed lockdowns, school closures and changing advice on masking went on for about three years. Doctors who had become household names became targets for backlash from people who didn't agree with the ongoing measures. B.C.'s Dr. Bonnie Henry says she needs government-supplied security to follow her around to this day due to threats. 

While the COVID-19 vaccine rollout was seen as a public health success with 81 per cent of Canadians receiving at least one shot by 2024, it also came with mandates that some rejected. 

Five years ago, the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic of the novel coronavirus, setting off a series of policies that transformed Canadians' lives for years.

The WHO's declaration followed months of warning signs about the dangers of COVID-19, including mass lockdowns in China and Italy, and served as a wake-up call for many Canadians.

"It really highlighted that it was not a situation that was confined to one area, one city — it really was a national and international response that was required," said Dr. Na-Koshie Lamptey, Toronto’s acting medical officer of health.

"And so you saw the mobilization of societal resources to fight it."

TORONTO - There had been warning signs for months.

There were the reports of dangerous flu-like symptoms in Asia. News of the lockdown that kept tens of millions of people inside their homes in China. Here at home, the growing ubiquity of blue surgical masks. The advice to sing "Happy Birthday" while washing your hands.

In March 2020, Ren Navarro recalled seeing large bottles of hand sanitizer at a beer event in Guelph, Ont., where she was a panellist. The Queen of Craft crowd was thinner than it should've been. It was being livestreamed for people at home.

"This was kind of like the unknowing precursor to what was going to happen," she said in a recent interview.

VANCOUVER - In early 2020, Lili Wu was already "armed to the teeth" whenever she ventured to public places near her home in Port Coquitlam, B.C. — face mask, sanitizer, protective eyewear and gloves.

It was more than a month before the World Health Organization's March declaration of a global pandemic that introduced most other Canadians to concepts like masking and social distancing.

But for Wu and many other members of Canada's Chinese-speaking communities, the outbreak that was exploding out of Wuhan, China, did not seem like a distant problem around the start of the Lunar New Year.

"When I came across the horrible news related to COVID-19 in China, I asked my two kids to watch with me together to give a sense of what was going on there," Wu said in an interview conducted in Mandarin.