Health committee  That may depend on the exact set-up of the application or the technology because I think there are different solutions. I would have to get someone who is an expert in this to let you know. I do know that, depending on the level of infection in the community, the number of contacts that you have to trace in order to suppress the chains of transmission can vary.

Health committee  First of all, the data gap is challenging, I would say. Part of it is a capacity issue, potentially, at different levels of the public health system. We do have a pan-Canadian public health network. We actually have many national or federal-provincial-territorial surveillance systems as it is, but we do need to improve on the....

Health committee  The Public Health Agency has worked with the provinces quite extensively on pandemic preparedness over many years, and I think that in terms of the international assessments, like the Global Health Security Index, we are one of the top countries in preparedness. However, this is an absolutely unprecedented global crisis, which I think all of us will have to learn from.

Health committee  What I said was that on average, provinces and territories are conducting about 26,000 to 28,000 tests per day. We do know that there's capacity now to do, just in the public health lab system, about 16,000 tests a day.

Health committee  We've been working very closely with the provinces and territories and doing a huge amount of work, of course, in getting supplies, whether they're swabs or reagents, and getting domestic manufacturing in gear right now. I think the capacity will continue to increase. As to the number of tests being done by each jurisdiction, part of this is related to where the epidemiology is at.

Health committee  Right now all information sharing is collaborative with the provinces and territories. This is how the public health system is set up, so yes, we have to depend on the ability of the health system to provide that. We are working right now with StatsCan to see what we can do to improve on that in order to get the data at the national level and fill in some of the blanks in the information we have.

Health committee  We do have a detailed epidemiologic report on our website. For example, in terms of hospitalization cases, close to 75% of them have underlying health conditions. Also on the website will be the analysis by age group and by sex, for example. That type of breakdown is available in the epidemiologic report, and it is posted.

Health committee  —wanting to provide their input as well into a peer-reviewed journal of what they're trying to do.

Health committee  It would be both. For example, when I presented the short-term forecasting model, it was one of the methods that was presented. But that kind of model tells you what might happen in the very near future and depends on case input. There are other models, including disease transmission models and dynamic models, that we have in-house, but which also take into account many different inputs from scientists across Canada.

Health committee  Yes, absolutely. Kim Elmslie, the VP in charge of the modelling team may want to supplement, but for sure, we can provide you with what we have. I know that our modellers were—

Health committee  Yes, absolutely.

Health committee  Again, the evidence is evolving as well, as we know.

Health committee  The approach we took was to have panels of experts. That leaves over 30 modelling experts from across the country to look at more than one methodology. It's not a single model, but they work pretty much constantly to update what the model's parameters would be, based on published information but also based on the Canadian models around the country.

Health committee  I think, again, with hindsight, at that time there weren't a lot of cases. If you had asked policy-makers at the time whether they would have closed the border— I'm not going to second-guess what they may think now—with all the lessons learned and knowing that some instantaneous travel restrictions are an option with, of course, the society willing to take all the different consequences of that—

Health committee  —going into the future, you may want to consider it faster.