Thank you for the question. I'll respond in English.
It's an excellent question.
As you point out, we strongly suspect that excess mortality has been a problem. Excess mortality in turn is likely associated with a further psychosocial or mental health toll on those families negatively impacted by missed surgeries or by increased mortality not related to COVID or related to cancellation of hospital services.
The one dimension that is closest to my own area of expertise that I do want to speak on as well in terms of missing data is that there's a dire need for better evidence-based research on the impact of isolation, increased screen time and virtual and distance learning on the psychosocial emotional development of youth and on their mental health.
The last thing I also wanted to mention in response to the previous question—what can we do to help our youth?—is that we knew before the pandemic that the figures were alarming and that our youth are in distress. There's a confluence of factors that contribute to the increased erosion of resilience among younger people. One of them is increased screen time. We know this from the research.
What I would like to implore our government to do, because we cannot rely on big tech companies to do this for us, is to, at some point, treat screen time like a controlled substance—like tobacco, cannabis or alcohol, substances that we know negatively impact development—and have clear, evidence-based guidelines for its regulation.
In the short term, we can also communicate those guidelines, through family physicians and through our educators, for responsible screen time and responsible screen use. This, many of us in the community believe, is a public health emergency. It already was before the pandemic, and it is considerably worse now.
Thank you for your question.