Yes. I'll give a very brief answer around SARS. I happened to be stationed out of the country that year, so I wasn't very close to it, but I have colleagues who worked right in the middle of it at Mount Sinai who, even now when you talk to them all these years later, are so traumatized they can hardly talk about it.
In our long-term care sector here, we have a colleague who reported from one of the homes. She volunteered to go in to help. Sixty of the residents out of the 170 had died in the previous three weeks, and eight had died that night. She looks completely haunted, and this is a 32-year-old, I guess; she's young. Everyone looks young compared to me, but she's just a young woman, a doctoral candidate, full of energy, and she just looks defeated. Then she got COVID herself as a result of the experience and feels she doesn't even know if she can go back into it.
We haven't had the ICU decision-making where I have to decide if you get a ventilator or you don't, or we're taking you off one because this one might do better and all that horrible stuff that came out of New York, Italy and Spain. We may have it hit harder in the long-term care sector, and I don't think that even at CNA it was so much on our radar that we thought it would sweep through there.
Yes, we are concerned about what comes out of this. We're really concerned that, for example, in Ontario it was suggested.... I think it was Mr. Ford on Thursday or Friday who suggested that the estimate for the catch-up for the surgeries that Dr. Dorian mentioned is two years. Who is going to do that? If all of these people are already working full time, where are those surgeons, techs and nurses going to come from?
We are concerned and we are also working with a different research team to measure some of the impacts of this on the workforce. Does it cause people to retire, to move and change? It's all sort of, at this point, a bit of a messy middle, but it's on our radar.
Thank you very much for that question.