Your daily COVID-19 update

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “A love-scene double” is the COVID-19-era term used by Bradley Bell, executive producer of the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful, to describe how romantic scenes will be filmed during production, which resumed this week. Actors’ spouses will be stand-ins for their characters’ significant others when a script calls for two characters to actually touch each other. Afterward, the other character will be edited back into the scene.

The number of Canadians infected with COVID-19 has passed 101,000, while 8,300 people have died. Worldwide, 8.4 million people have been infected and 450,000 have died.

“That’s the most risky thing I have to do,” says one Torontonian of taking the elevator in his condo building. He’s not alone. Many Canadians are “grappling with the uncomfortable reality that elevators are among the least desirable forms of transportation in a pandemic,” John Lorinc writes in Maclean’s.

In March, when New York City was buckling under its COVID-19 pandemic, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, ordered anyone arriving from New York into a 14-day quarantine and mulled closing his state’s border. Now, with Florida’s caseload exploding and New York’s subsiding, the northern state’s governor is thinking of doing the same. “Tale of two cities, two countries,” Andrew Cuomo said. “Who would believe this—who would believe this 180 turnaround?”

A small study in Nature suggests that antibodies to COVID-19 may last in a person’s body for only two or three months after they were infected, especially for those who never showed any symptoms of the new coronavirus, the New York Times reports. At the same time, another small study in the same journal suggests that even low levels of antibodies may be enough to fend off reinfection.

In May, the Russian government reported that 101 health care workers had died of COVID-19—a number believed to be far lower than the real number, especially as doctors groups have informally gathered a list of more than 440 names. Now, the health ministry has revised that official figure to 489.

California Governor Gavin Newsom ordered everyone in the state to wear masks in public or high-risk settings, such as shopping. “Simply put, we are seeing too many people with faces uncovered—putting at risk the real progress we have made in fighting the disease,” Newsom stated.

Would you queue for fast food in the middle of a pandemic? Hundreds did just that in Alberta as Popeyes brought its wildly popular chicken sandwich north of the border for the first time. The fast food chain picked the province as its testing ground as, “Alberta is in a—I guess—a more advanced stage of the COVID recovery than some other places in the country,” Rob Manuel, Popeyes Canada general manager, told Global News.

—Patricia Treble

As of the latest update, this is the number of confirmed cases in Canada. We're updating this chart every day.