To start with your second question, early days were the immediate response. We all know about the Canadians caught on the cruise ships who needed to be brought home and be treated in the most humane way possible at the same time as being quarantined. We provided immediate assistance as well as for those in Japan. We're talking about direct operations.
I think the key when we talk about surge capacity is that the Red Cross, as you say, is present everywhere and everybody congratulates us for that, but what you don't see is the amount of training we do to make sure that people, volunteers and pre-positioned materials are ready. We've been talking the last few years about increasing that base capacity to deal with natural disasters. I think we've helped some 260,000 Canadians displaced by fires, floods and so on in the last four years. Now we have an additional component, a pandemic, which requires a little more specialized surge and a little more capacity in terms of infection....
We want to take stock with public authorities on the expectation for the Red Cross to support them at the municipal, provincial and national levels. Then, we want to look at how we increase that base capacity and what kind of equipment we need to restock. I am talking about equipment and about our partnership in supporting provincial health authorities: what has worked, what is needed for a second wave and what is helpful. As a first reaction, we tend to throw everything we have at something. After that, we can say what exactly we need to restock.
I was talking about the north in terms of the 80-bed full hospitals We've deployed parts of those. Again, this expertise was developed on the international side. We are very strong, and this expertise was used efficiently in Canada. When we look at the north, we look at smaller mobile capacity, and we got a lot of requests from first nations communities to deploy equipment and support them.
We're taking stock of the fact that we have to stop treating these surge events as exceptional. We need a standing capacity that's a little more elevated to support all these needs.