This is a really important point, and one on which public health needs to do a better job. Describing what did not happen and what is prevented is not an easy task.
The Public Health Agency scientists did provide a publication recently on what we call “counterfactual scenarios”, where we looked at the impact of vaccination and the collective response of public health measures in Canada. If we had done absolutely nothing.... And that was not going to happen. But just imagine that you did not have any vaccines, that you did not follow any public health measures. You would have had, of course, most of the population being cases, up to 34 million cases, two million hospitalizations—that's stress on your hospital systems—and up to 800,000 deaths.
Of course, there are many in-between scenarios, whether we look at the application of public health measures without the vaccine or the application of vaccines without public health measures. The bottom line is that you actually needed them both, particularly during different times of the pandemic when there wasn't a vaccine and then when there was a vaccine.
This is why I say that we have to remember the impacts of this pandemic. Relative to other G7 and peer countries, we did relatively well—that is, compared with the death rates in the United States, the United Kingdom and other similar countries. We have to learn and be humble. We have to learn from other countries that have done better than us, as well.