Doctor, thanks for the question. You're referring to a study that we released last week with my Ph.D. student Brieanne Olibris.
As you know, each of the 10 provinces has a self-assessment tool on its health website, which basically asks Canadians, “Do you have a fever? Do you have difficulty breathing? Have you been travelling?”, a variety of questions like that. Depending on what the person inputs into this website, each province has its own.... They're all different. The person may be told they're in big trouble and to call 911 right away, or they may be told to stay at home or they may be told to call their family doctor. It depends, province by province.
We did a comparison of all 10 provinces. You'd like to see they're all giving the same medical information, because for certain things there's really only one medically correct answer. What you get is that this is not the case at all. Each province has created an assessment tool that doesn't match the other provinces. None of them match the official case definition of COVID from the Public Health Agency or the World Health Organization. This is just incompetent. I don't have a polite word for it.
The right way for the country to be doing this is to have a single health assessment tool that representatives of the provinces can agree on and the Public Health Agency of Canada can offer.
It must be available in both official languages, because it is important that it be offered to Quebecers as well.
Then this tool can be used by all provinces. We haven't done that. We're terribly disunited, and in some cases that disuniting is probably killing people. In a few provinces, if you use their self-assessment tool and you say you have a headache, the provinces tell you that it's not a COVID symptom, but of course headache is a COVID symptom. In some provinces people are receiving medically incorrect information about the disease, and that could really kill them. It's not something that should be happening.