Sure. Thank you, Mr. Kelloway.
This is Barry Power speaking.
Actually, I was speaking to a pharmacist in Sydney last week about this very issue. She was explaining some of the concerns that have been brought back to them from patients.
The situation in Canada is that we get about 80% of our prescription drugs from China and India, with the bulk of them coming from China. China has been in shutdown since January, and the manufacturing processes and the shipping of medications into Canada have pretty much come to a standstill. As a result, we had double the normal volume in March, and we've seen drains on the warehouses and the stockpiles of medications we have in Canada.
We already have a system that's very fragile. We have drug shortages, and we were very concerned about pharmaceuticals going the way of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, with those very constituents having to go from pharmacy to pharmacy to try to fill a prescription, so we had to make a decision quickly.
We decided that 30 days would give people enough prescription drugs to allow them to shelter in place for two full 14-day quarantine periods, and we would be able to make any subsequent deliveries to them. We did reach out immediately to drug plans, provincial drug plans and private payers, to try to get them to come on board as part of the COVID-19 response in Canada to cover some of the co-pays that people are seeing.
We absolutely recognize that this is a burden on people, and we continue to advocate for all payers to help offset some of the costs that people are being faced with.