Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon. I would like to echo some of what I have written already in The Globe and Mail about my obsession about avoiding the worst-case scenario for Canada in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic.
I think all of us right now are holding our breath and are hoping that our physical distancing strategy will do the job to flatten the curve. The reality right now is we have put our health care system on pause in order to gear up and prepare for a surge of COVID-19 patients. Another reality is the managing of a pandemic with a shortage of medical resources.
My key message for you today—and I will bring forward a few examples—is to really prepare for the worst-case scenario but also very much to prevent what is preventable.
In terms of the health care system and the health care facilities, I am very adamant about pushing for dedicated medical facilities or dedicated parts of facilities with dedicated staff only for COVID-19 patients. It has been proven again and again that swapping staff from COVID-positive to COVID-negative patients may contribute to more infected patients. It is very evident that people working in a close circle of patients become much better at caring for patients. In this closed environment if there is a COVID-positive patient, they are going to go through the part that only COVID-positive patients would go through. There should be dedicated places, for example, to get an X-ray. A COVID-negative patient should not cross paths with a COVID-positive patient. That's a way to make sure our health care system doesn't become a vector for COVID-19. Additionally, a secondary gain is it might reduce the amount of personal protective equipment we might need.
I would like to draw your attention to a few special circumstances. It's about the vulnerable communities. It has made the headlines now about the homes for the elderly, but there are the shelters and the first nations as well. For me, it is mandatory to think about implementing radical shielding strategies. This means that we shield those vulnerable populations. It's what we call reverse isolation.
We isolate the sick, but we also isolate the vulnerable. We shouldn't do what has been done in Quebec, which is the double failure of isolating our elders and not giving them the right and adequate care. We need to make sure we avoid that.
There is another thing we need to bring in as quickly as possible. We need to test regularly the caregivers who care for those vulnerable communities. We know there is an increasing number of asymptomatic people, and they become what we call “super-spreaders” who are infecting others. The bottom line is we don't want to import COVID-19 into vulnerable communities. We don't want to bring it into our first nations. We don't want to bring it into homes for the elderly. We don't want to bring it into the shelters.
I also want to make a point about the health care staff, and I'm pretty sure that people from the mental health community will say something about this as well. For me it's mandatory. I have seen it with Ebola. I have seen it with cholera. I have seen it now with COVID-19 in my hospital. We need to protect our health care workers, first-line workers, physically and mentally. That's our last line of defence for this pandemic.
I'm bringing that to your attention, MPs, because I would say it's very uncivilized when my boss in the ER is telling me to please use PPE wisely. This is nerve-racking. I do understand that we have to use our PPE carefully, but if you want us to care for patients, I'm begging you to care for us and protect us.
It is important that you do everything to protect us physically and mentally as well. We should have hotlines to discuss what is going on, hotlines for the ethics committee that's going to help us make difficult decisions on patients who are on ventilators. They might want to remove the ventilator or stop care. We need to have psychological counselling and support all the time. Nobody should be blackmailed for not feeling comfortable to work in a COVID-positive environment.
Again, knowing the growing community transmission that's going on, I still think that as soon as we have enough tests, we should try to test our first-line workers regularly because of the asymptomatic carriers.
The last general point I would like to make is about the non-COVID patient. Life goes on even if we have COVID-19. It would be a disaster, a tragedy, if highly treatable and preventable medical conditions became lethal. We know that now, a patient with a heart attack is dying at home or with cerebrovascular accident is staying alone at home with their disease and illness. It is important right now that we make sure we're not creating a second-rate status for non-COVID-19 patients, because life goes on. We need to have a plan to relaunch the health care system in an incremental way. It is really, really important. You cannot put a whole health care system on hold forever; otherwise, we will start to die of very preventable diseases.
As a humanitarian aid worker, I cannot not talk about the more global message of where Canada stands on the global response in the world. I know we're tackling what we have here, but we know as well that the only way to win against COVID-19 is to win in every single country. My plea as well for Canada is to find out how we are going to support the low- and middle-income countries to respond to COVID-19, knowing that we are so interconnected and knowing that making all of us healthier depends on making each of us healthier.
So knowing that the Canadian government has invested $300 million, or at least pledged $300 million, for research and development, I beg you to make sure that there are all the safeguards—that the vaccine, the treatment or the tests that will be developed will be a public good; that Canadians as much as other people will have access to those new discoveries; and that it will be affordable and accessible to all.
Thank you very much.