To comment on the experience in British Columbia, one of the major challenges we found is that our long-term care sector is fragmented in terms of who owns, operates and runs those facilities. If you were working in a long-term care facility that was owned and operated by a health authority, there was greater coordination in terms of purchasing personal protective equipment and the standards that it came under.
In the early days, the privately run long-term care facilities and affiliate-run facilities were left to source a lot of their equipment. We had experiences where we needed to escalate PPE delivery to some of these facilities during outbreaks where they were caring for COVID-19-positive residents without the equipment they needed, or to facilities that found a source from a supplier that wasn't meeting the standards required for health care, and finding that we were even needing to ship this by taxi to those facilities.
One of the things that helped along the way was a centralized supply hub that the province set up, but again, the time it took for that to be established across all of the sector and all of the different owners and operators.... It took a significant amount of time during the crisis.