Here’s the latest on the COVID-19 pandemic in Surrey, White Rock and beyond for Sunday, June 7.
• With COVID-19 putting a strain on Sources Foundation fundraising efforts, the West Coast Golf Group has stepped up and donated $36,250 in recent weeks.
• The chatter among a group of siblings and their spouses who were carefully spaced on a grassy patch of White Rock’s East Beach Thursday included memories of childhood days spent running across the shoreline towards the water. The siblings got together to share beachfront memories following the reopening of waterfront parking.
• Lawsuits involving seniors homes, airlines, universities and ticket provides affected by COVID-19 could tie up Canadian courts for years, says a litigation lawyer
• More than 157,000 students returned to schools during the first week of in-class instruction in B.C. since March.
The province’s schools had been closed since mid-March amid the COVID-19 pandemic, reopening on June 1. With the first week completed, the education ministry said Sunday that the 157,000 returning students represented about 30 per cent of the province’s total student count.
• While hundreds of thousands of companies across the country have seen work grind to a halt amid COVID-19, an artificial intelligence-powered content moderation company is experiencing the opposite.
Two Hat, which provides services to customers including Nintendo, Supercell and Habbo, sifts through billions of comments and conversations and quickly identifies and removes anything harmful.
“We processed 60 billion last month. It used to be 30 billion. That’s how bad coronavirus is. That is at least twice the normal volume,” Chris Priebe, of Two Hat, said in April before monthly processing volumes hit 90 billion.
• Care aides at the Lynn Valley Care Centre are looking to unionize in the wake of a deadly COVID-19 outbreak at the North Vancouver facility, signalling workers’ appetites for better conditions and compensation in the beleaguered sector.