I like your analogy. I think I've used it before, that an alert is like a fire alarm. An alert is meant to make you stop what you're doing and go investigate and decide what action is needed. If you're standing outside your home looking at the fire, it doesn't really matter if your smoke detector is going off inside.
I think when it comes to risk assessments, I would look at two things. I would look at the alert system having to trigger a different response or create a sense of heightened awareness. As well, once the daily report identified this that this virus was of concern, the agency had the risk assessment tools it needed to use in order to help predict the impact of the virus. This is where we saw a tool that was not appropriate being used: It wasn't considering the risk of a pandemic. As you can imagine, when there is a virus here, you need to look at risk of its spreading. In a pandemic you also need to look at what the risk of a virus coming to Canada is and then look at what the risk of its spreading. It really needs to have that forward-looking projection. That was not there. Again, it's like your smoke detector, that warning that makes you stop and go to look to see what you need to do.
In this instance, our audit found that the two alert systems did not work as intended.