Health committee  Honourable committee members, thank you for the privilege of appearing before you. The last several months have offered us as a country extraordinary challenges. As an epidemiologist, internist and parent, these challenges have subsumed every part of my work life and my persona

Health committee  I think part of the difficulty relates to the fact that viruses are the troublemakers, and Dr. Khan alluded to this. The troublemakers tend to be RNA viruses, that's their genetic material that comes from animals. RNA viruses are very good at mutating. What we see with this virus

Health committee  I'm sorry.

Health committee  Thank you.

Health committee  I'm not sure, though I could add my perspective as a researcher based in Toronto since 2006. What I've always found astounding is the failure to make accessible data that are paid for, assembled and cleaned on the public dime available to Canadians in a manner that doesn't threa

Health committee  I think my own province is, and I appreciate tremendously the pressure our premier is under. I think he's done a marvellous job given the cards he's been dealt, but I'm also aware there are a lot of folks who want to get back to business. I'm not sure whether doing a screen sha

Health committee  Right.

Health committee  The resurgences will happen. It's just how this works. It's simple math. The reproduction of a disease is number of contacts times the probability of transmission per contact times how long a person is infectious for. We can forget about immunity right now, because immunity is lo

Health committee  My apologies. We're going to go too far. We're going to try to open things up and go too far. That's why we need strong surveillance systems, to see that as it happens.

Health committee  I don't know. Mr. Ciciretto is an expert on how labs work and could probably give you a more meaningful answer than I could. We do work with local public health units. My concern at the moment is that it's not just the testing. If people are saying we're going to do contact tra

Health committee  I'll tell you, my group at University of Toronto call ourselves “data raccoons”, because we've sort of managed to thrive for about 15 years on data that most people regard as garbage, so it's sort of a bit of the normal state of affairs for us with public health data analysis. Th

Health committee  Thank you very much. There are a lot of moving parts here. Herd immunity can be approximated as a function of the reproduction number of the disease. The higher the reproduction number, the more people need to be immune if the disease is not to take off. That's why we see measle

Health committee  Honestly, it's a dilemma. I think I mentioned earlier that the signature of this disease is that it takes off with big gatherings, so there's a lot you can probably reopen economically, safely, if you stay away from large gatherings of people. The one big gathering that's reall

Health committee  I think the idea is that economically it holds a country back. Even if we have 40% of our workforce able to work from home, for the parents, it's often difficult to get their jobs done if they're minding children in parallel. However, yes, it's an issue. Countries like Korea ha

Health committee  Do you know what? I'm not sure to what extent I can talk about private conversations in this public forum but, as I speak to colleagues across the country, what is clear to me is that the places that got the job done were aware of their deficiencies as laboratory systems and work