Mr. Chair, I think the member hit the nail on the head, which is that these are layers of protection. If you think of all of these as layers that you put on to protect yourself and those around you, that's how we look at both public health measures and the vaccines.
Let's go to vaccines first. We have been incredibly fortunate in that we have a suite of vaccines, which we would never have imagined arriving so fast, and that they're safe. The vaccine effectiveness has been great. For our parents and grandparents, the vaccines have been very effective for this part of the population at the outset.
For those in long-term care facilities in particular, it's been very effective in reducing cases, reducing severity of illness and reducing the number of outbreaks in long-term care. That's the population that was most impacted at the start of this pandemic, and we're seeing the vaccines at work right there.
The provinces and territories are now readjusting their measures at those long-term care facilities, still with layers of protection, with the masking, hand hygiene and testing and screening as needed, and people are able to have more visitors, to see more of their family members. That's what vaccines are doing right now.
Health care workers, based on some data from our provinces, are well protected even after that very important first dose. Vaccines are thus definitely at work and are doing well.
As everybody has articulated, we need to ensure that people roll up their sleeves when their turn comes. Particularly at the moment, when the population in that protective layer of vaccines is escalating, public health measures are extremely important when variants are around. They mean that we need to get the cases down in your communities in order to protect everybody. Vaccines alone are not going to be able to do it, but they play a really key part.
I have to say that there are some very good early signals that not only do vaccines protect you against serious illness and death, but particularly some of the mRNA vaccines are demonstrating that you can probably cut down on the onward transmission as well.
We are, then, continually analyzing the data, but it's all really great news.