Mr. Chair, I would say PHAC was able to rapidly mobilize, adapt and respond to the evolving COVID-19 situation, including administering an unprecedented border and quarantine measures program.
There are a few examples. The agency established the program to follow up with travellers required to quarantine following March 2020. The agency was able to establish a Quarantine Act compliance verification program, which made over four million live agent phone calls, sent 13 million promotional emails, made 6.5 million robocalls, and also conducted in-person compliance checks, which were directed at 540,000 travellers.
In addition, Mr. Chair, we also established a compassionate exemption program. This allows travellers who would otherwise be prohibited from entering Canada to attend funerals and provide care or support to critically ill persons. We established that program and processed over 64,000 applications.
We also had the Canada border testing program, which we talked about, through which we were doing surveillance to see how many travellers were coming in. This was launched in February 2021. We did 4.38 million on-arrival and post-arrival tests, and we analyzed them so we could successfully detect and isolate infected travellers. Then, as of August 2021, we moved on to mandatory random testing.
Now, in addition, Mr. Chair, we continually expanded and enhanced Canada's ability to limit importation by establishing emergency travel and border measures under different acts. The Quarantine Act designated quarantine facilities and data monitoring.
I must mention the ArriveCAN app, which is an application to capture the key public health information of travellers. As of August 2020, over 80% of weekly travellers entering Canada had started to use that digitally. Now, those actions were really conflated to the point where we could mitigate travel-related importation, specifically in November of the omicron variant, through our enhanced testing and quarantine requirements and travel restrictions.
On top of everything, all of these measures, including the testing program, allowed us to really concentrate on identifying any variant of concern by genomic sequencing in our laboratory. This involved a whole array of things.
I could go on, but I think that captures what we did in the Public Health Agency to support that.