Thanks for the question, and again, thanks for the opportunity.
Dr. Soulez has arrived. Thank you, Gilles, for making it.
I'll make a few comments on the wait-lists and whatnot.
The equipment is readily available in the marketplace. The investment turnaround time in the last cycle, 2005-06, was about three years. It ramped up and it made about a seven- to 10-year improvement in the wait-lists on CT and MRI, cardiology, interventional radiology and things of that nature.
In terms of the targeting, a lot of the screening done, particularly mammography, has been reduced. For our mammography screening, it's less than 50%, because of COVID and the intimate location you have when you're screening with mammography. The technologists in particular are very exposed to a patient, so they were reduced to about 10% of their workload at that time. Then, just basically, when a COVID patient comes into our CT scan or our MRI, it takes fully one hour to turn it around. There's a COVID protocol based on ventilation and cleaning with Lysol. Then the room has to sit for an hour afterwards.
I was on call a few weekends ago when we had a COVID patient at the Saint John Regional Hospital emergency area. We fortunately have two scanners. I had to use the older scanner, which was about nine years old. It was routine. You wouldn't really compromise diagnostic capability to keep the trauma scanner open, but once we did that patient, which took 15 minutes, it took 15 minutes to clean it, and then we had downtime of about an hour, as the room had to ventilate. If you're in a smaller centre than ours, you could shut down the whole scanner for the whole day.
If you're having people coming through the hospital on a daily basis, you could see how the wait-list would get extended just based on the COVID patients, and then the reduction in volumes that could go on—