We have been actively engaged with the provinces and territories, as well as indigenous and municipal governments.
During the COVID-19 federal response, we put in place a single window at the Public Health Agency [Technical difficulty—Editor] to reach out to us for the surge supports that would be available to them. We had over 150 operational calls with the jurisdictions to help them to get access to the resources available to them. That can include things like contact tracing supports and supplies from the national emergency strategic stockpile. As well, we were able to deploy epidemiologists. Just as an example, we were able to send epidemiologists to a James Bay area region that had several first nations communities, including Kashechewan, which saw over 10% of their population infected and several residents requiring hospital interventions.
The government also put in place a safe voluntary isolation sites program that allowed for over 60 isolation sites in 47 communities to be funded, which supported over 17,000 individuals. These are the types of activities that helped to [Technical difficulty—Editor] break transmissions.
One of the key learnings for this has been the ability to work with the jurisdictions, but also to put innovation and virtual supports in place. On the contact tracing, for example, we were able to support the programming with virtual call centre supports and similarly able to support other jurisdictions with remote epidemiological outbreak management.
There were quite a number of areas where we were able to work in concert with the jurisdictions. I think the gains that have been made in infection prevention and control programs as well have been another area where we've not only had an opportunity to step into an outbreak but also to help them lay a path forward in a number of areas to put key programming in place that would help mitigate further infections.