Thank you very much.
I would like to thank the honourable members, and Mr. Davies in particular, for the invitation.
As stated, I am a critical care physician. I work at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, where I am now. I've had the opportunity also to engage in graduate studies at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and I chair the Canadian Critical Care Trials Group, a world-leading group of interprofessional academic researchers and patient partners who study the best care for our sickest patients.
My own personal and academic interests, clinically, are around the care of critically ill patients. That is directly relevant to the COVID pandemic. I've had an opportunity to examine other health care systems in well-resourced settings first-hand and academically. Also, my work with the WHO and various non-governmental organizations during SARS and different outbreaks and pandemics over the years includes avian influenza, Middle East respiratory syndrome, and a couple of years of Ebola outbreaks in western Africa and, last year, in the DRC. I have helped the WHO and the Public Health Agency in most of these outbreaks in one capacity or another through guidelines or clinical care on the ground.
In terms of disclosures, I don't have any financial relationships with industry or pharmaceutical companies. I have received peer-reviewed funding from CIHR, and I am supporting the Canadian response to WHO's solidarity trial, which examines and evaluates medications for COVID-19.
The context I'll speak from otherwise is more specific to COVID-19.
As we know, it has spread rapidly over the last four months to many countries around the world. The infection rate is unknown but estimated at over three million people, causing 200,000 deaths, and well over 50,000 cases in Canada with approximately 3,000 deaths. Despite this most commonly causing mild illness, the temporal concentration of infections among susceptible populations has, at times, overwhelmed seemingly robust health care systems and their capacities, specifically too few intensive care beds and ventilators for patients and too little personal protective equipment for health care workers. That's been seen prominently in other jurisdictions, and we have been worried about it in Canada. We have prepared for it, but have been just on the precipice.
Probably people are very familiar with this by now through their own knowledge or reading, this being a very common topic in the lay press. It typically presents as a mild illness, respiratory in nature, but can progress to cause severe pneumonia, the need for oxygen, administration of mechanical ventilation and on rare occasions sometimes beyond that, we need circulation of the blood outside the body to provide oxygen and carbon dioxide removal and some assistance for the heart and lungs with dialysis and pump function. These patients can get very ill. Therefore, care in a hospital ICU is one of the direct elements of this outbreak, more so than others we have experienced, by the numbers of patients who have been infected and presented at hospitals.
In many of the publications to date, the mortality rates among those requiring intensive care has been shockingly high for me, as someone who treats patients in an ICU all the time.