Thank you very much for the question, Mr. Chair.
You're correct. CIHI did actually share some information quite recently about how the long-term care sector in the country had been quite hard hit.
Overall, looking across all age groups, Canada's death rate from COVID has actually been lower than an international average, but the incidents in long-term care have definitely stood out as one of the highest. One of the things we learned from this was that countries that implemented some specific measures targeted at the long-term care sector at the same time as they put in their broader shutdown measures really had many fewer COVID infections and deaths in long-term care. Some of the things that might be included in specific long-term care measures would be around broad testing for residents of long-term care facilities, and repeated testing. There would be isolation wards, potentially, to make sure that if one of the residents becomes ill, there's a way to separate that resident from others to reduce infection.
As well, one of the important parts is is to have the right kinds of supports for long-term care workers, such as being able to use surge staffing, for example, when the caseload became greater. In Canada's case, the army was involved in some provinces. Others were having specialized trained teams and were making personal protective equipment freely available so that all of the long-term care workers felt secure.
Those are some of the measures we've seen in other countries that had lower death rates in long-term care.