Thank you, Ms. Ashton.
I would just like to state, on the question around the Cuban doctors, that we took a tour to Cuba and asked to have a contingent or a brigade come here to Manitoba. Part of the reasoning behind that was that we had seen a crisis coming. We had already been working to have this happen prior to the pandemic getting to the point where it is. We wanted to see the kind of impact that it could have, because what we've seen in our communities is a lack of services on the ground. We haven't had long-term people in the community. We have rotating nurses coming into some of our isolated communities. We wanted to have long-term, consistent service being provided.
What we saw was the World Health Organization giving a great deal of notoriety to the Cuban health system. We wanted to see if the return on investment would be significant and we wanted to see what kind of return on investment we would get if we were to put it side by side with what we're seeing with the current health outcomes and the current strategy. That was kind of the reasoning. There aren't a great deal of resources, and we understand that, so if we can get better health outcomes through this process then perhaps that's something that we should consider expanding. That was kind of the point with Cuba, and we're continuing, obviously, to try to have doctors come into our communities to help with the health transformation side of things. We could, maybe, have some of our people trained at their international health institute over there. We toured the facility. That was our point there, to get a better return on investment. If we could see that as a reality and a measured investment that could work, then we would like to go there.
Second, in many of our communities, rather than having people go into the urban centres and purchase goods, they actually buy in bulk. Some of the communities are disinfecting the merchandise that comes into the community and then packaging it into care packages. They break open the shipments and break them down into smaller packages. At that point, they didn't have PPE equipment. We wanted to have that in our communities for the people who were doing this, so that they could screen out any potential bacteria that might have been coming into the community. There are examples of that in many of our communities, including Wayway and others—in quite a few actually. That's what they've been doing in the communities, bulk buying.
Many of the communities have also been doing that in the urban centres, in Winnipeg. Many of the tribal councils have been involved in that. That's kind of what we're looking at, how best to utilize the limited resources we have while protecting our people. That's what many of our people, those people who are receiving the food and other stuff and protective equipment, have been doing. We've been hoping to support them more. I know there were about two or three weeks when there was nothing there for them. There was a bit of risk happening. Thank god in Manitoba we've done a very good job of flattening the curve, and hopefully we will continue to see zero new infections.