I want to take this opportunity to update you on some of our activities moving forward from last week. Today I believe you all received a two-pager, a summary of some of our communications activities.
I wanted to show you this document. I would be happy to have it updated systematically. You will be able to see everything that the Public Health Agency of Canada is doing in terms of H1N1 social marketing and communications to reach Canadians and those concerned.
As you can see, we've undertaken a huge number of activities in the last six months. When we look at the traffic on our website and the amount of interest in our preparedness guide, we have to go to another reprint. We are running out of them. We launched the guide just two weeks ago.
There's a huge amount of interest. The level of awareness of H1N1 is extremely high when you consider that six months ago no one had ever heard of H1N1, or pandemic H1N1. We're seeing a high rate of awareness across the country.
People are asking questions about the vaccine and whether or not they'll get vaccinated. It's a reflection of a lack of information. I think people are currently in the process of making decisions about their health and assessing the choices they have. I think the information campaigns, all the outreach, all the interviews that Dr. Grondin and Dr. Butler-Jones have provided, the ongoing three-times-a-week media conferences we're holding, are just a few tactics that clearly demonstrate that a lot of information is being provided to Canadians.
I can say that Tuesday, after the clinics started across the country— some got started on Monday—we saw a threefold increase to the fightflu.ca website that we manage at the Public Health Agency. An all-time high was 60,000 visits. We got 196,000 visits on Tuesday. That's 22,000 visits an hour on our website. Canadians know about fightflu.ca. They're coming to our website in high numbers.
They're visiting up to three pages per visit, which is very good; they're spending more time on those pages. That means they're reading the information; they're going deeper to find good, reliable information. And interestingly, our metrics show us they're not going to the vaccine safety fact sheet, they're going to other fact sheets on risk benefit and other information, because they do want to make a well-informed decision about their health and the health of their family.
So from the perspective of whether or not our communications strategy is working, I think there's ample evidence that Canadians are going to the clinics and they want to get vaccinated.
The national strategy is also a cascading strategy. I mentioned that last week. It's not just the federal government that provides information to Canadians; it's in partnership with the provinces and territories and the local authorities. So for those of you who spend any time in Ottawa, who may live here during the week, you know that ottawa.ca provides a huge amount of information to residents of Ottawa on where they can find the clinics and other information on the vaccine and on H1N1. And because they are linked to Ontario Public Health and the Ontario Ministry of Health is linked to us through our network, all the information Canadians are getting from reliable public health sources is consistent and coherent.
You may question that there are a lot of other voices out there. That's right. And increasingly, when we hear and see vaccine myths or....
There is misinformation out there, which really does nothing to help Canadians make informed decisions. We are being aggressive in countering those sources of information, and we are trying to direct those who have questions to our Web site, FightFlu.ca. I just wanted to share those statistics with you. I know they may just be numbers that do not mean much to you, but as I tell you every week, I would be happy to update them in order to keep you informed of our activities.