Health committee  I think it's a function of assumptions related to the evolution of the virus and the extent to which new variants affect vaccine effectiveness or escape the immune protection that's generated by the existing vaccines. This is definitely something we have to look at and follow very closely.

Health committee  I think that depends on what you mean by COVID-zero. If it means—

Health committee  Good afternoon, honourable members, and thank you for the opportunity to address this standing committee. The COVID-19 Immunity Task Force was established by the Government of Canada in April 2020 with a two-year mandate. We work virtually and have a leadership group that's co-chaired by Dr.

Health committee  I think we need to be very careful. There are always things we can't predict. If the number of infections were to drop for four, five or six weeks in a row, we could see policies and projections changing. For the time being, however, I think it's smart, even necessary, to keep all the public health measures in place.

Health committee  Thank you for your question. It's a very important one right now. We don't have any models indicating when the reproduction number will drop below 1, at which point we will have reached herd immunity. We are working on building those models. To that end, we are working with the people who are making certain projections right now.

Health committee  I'd just like to clarify in answering your question that the COVID-19 immunity task force is not focusing on testing, either with antigens or with the real-time PCR, RT-PCR. However, I would say that the evidence from across countries is that where you have not only more aggressive or higher levels of testing but also much more timely determination of the results and follow-up of contacts, those countries are in a better position to control the epidemic I think, again, in the spirit of learning, that Canada has a lot to learn with regard to how to manage testing systems such that they get to the populations where the problem is greatest and they're managed in such a way that you get timely results and can mobilize contact tracers in a way that mitigates the spread of infection.

Health committee  My personal opinion on this is that getting more disseminated testing according to very clear public health standards is the only way to reach the levels of testing that are necessary to really mitigate the spread of infection.

Health committee  I don't know the exact capacity. I've been part of discussions with an effort to mobilize capacity for tracking the variants. It's multi-faceted related to sequencing capacity, and also linking this to follow-up of the implications of the variant in its impact on transmission, as well as the disease profile of people who have those variants.

Health committee  Canada has very impressive sequencing capacity through a set of institutions. Once they are joined together, we should certainly have that capacity across the country.

Health committee  It's a very good question. We're looking to understand the immune implications of the variants. This is a combination of observing the patterns of the variants in the population in terms of the impact they have on transmission and on the disease pattern, but also carrying out more laboratory-based studies that help us to understand how these variants might act differently from the other forms of the virus that we've been looking at thus far.

Health committee  You may or may not recall, but when the task force was launched in April 2020 there wasn't a single approved immunoassay at that time. The first approvals took place in May. Those were approvals for assays that required a formal blood draw from a vein. We got those into the studies as quickly as we could.

Health committee  Thank you very much for the opportunity to present today. I'll say a few words about Canada's COVID-19 Immunity Task Force. The task force was formed in late April 2020 by the Government of Canada with a two-year mandate. Working virtually, the task force leadership group, co-chaired by doctors Catherine Hankins and David Naylor, is a representative set of volunteer experts from across the country who are focused on understanding the nature of immunity arising from the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and understanding the prevalence of the infection in the general population as well as specific communities and priority populations.