I think this is timely. There's a report from the Public Health Agency of Canada that talks about measures that have helped. Certainly there were difficult discussions in the first year, but we fared better than many other countries in the world did—the United States and those in Europe—in limiting morbidity and mortality from the disease. That's not to say we didn't have problems. As a clinician, I can remember the devastation that we had in long-term care facilities in the first couple of waves, and that really marked a very vulnerable group in the pandemic, which was disproportionately affected in that sense.
Similarly, I think of the appropriate and rapid access to vaccines and positive public health messaging. As the virus progressed and we were able to get vaccinated, that paid dividends on everything.
This is interesting when you start looking at the last year of the pandemic, from August 2021 to August 2022. Canada actually fared very well compared with other countries, including places that had significant measures, such as Hong Kong, which did not vaccinate its elderly appropriately. Once the virus made its way there, despite significant measures in place like masking, quarantine requirements and testing at the airport, the cumulative deaths per capita over the entire pandemic was higher in Hong Kong than in Canada. That really was marked over a couple of months of the pandemic.
I think Canada has done very well on this stage. It's hard to dissect what exactly it was, but I think the co-operation between provincial and federal governments, particularly in the first year and a half of the pandemic, and the widespread availability of vaccinations have largely put us front and centre as one of the countries that tried to balance everything appropriately going forward.