Health committee  Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for inviting me to be a part of this important discussion today. First let me introduce myself and tell you a bit about my background and its relevance to today's meeting. My name is Kamran Khan, and I'm a physician trained in internal medicine, infectious diseases, and preventive medicine and public health.

Health committee  As I mentioned in my opening remarks, our surveillance system had picked this up on December 31. You may also be aware that the Public Health Agency of Canada has a platform called the Global Public Health Intelligence Network, GPHIN. There are some parallels with the platform we're using.

Health committee  I'd be happy to do that.

Health committee  Because the Public Health Agency already has a surveillance system and GPHIN had picked up news of the outbreak in Wuhan around the same time as BlueDot, we didn't send them that information because it was something they already had access to. But we have been working with the Public Health Agency around contextualizing this.

Health committee  We discussed obviously what the risks were, but, of course, as you remember, in early January we didn't even know this was the coronavirus. Clearly it caused enough concern from our end just because there were some parallels with the SARS event that had emerged in late 2002 in Guangdong.

Health committee  We have had interactions with the ministry of health in Ontario and have been actively working with the province there. At BlueDot, we're a team of about 50 people. We're also working via Global Affairs Canada—

Health committee  I'm so sorry about that. We are also working with Global Affairs Canada to support capacity building—as I mentioned in my opening remarks—in 10 countries in Southeast Asia. We're working with the State of California. In many regards I think we would be very eager to support public health responses across the country and work closely with the provinces and territories.

Health committee  Maybe the way I could sort of frame what we have been building with the metaphor of a smoke detector and fire extinguisher. For six and a half years, we've been building systems to be able to detect threats early, because we know, as I mentioned, that time is our most valuable resource.

Health committee  Yes, thank you. It's a really big and very important issue. The four Ds that we work on are detection, dispersion, disruption and dissemination. Detection speaks for itself, early detection. Dispersion mean, how do these things leap across continents in hours? How do we anticipate the next move?

Health committee  I think the point—and this is sort of a gradient—was literally December 31. First seeing that information certainly caused some alarm. Around the middle of January—and I'd have to double-check the exact date—was when the first case showed up in Bangkok. I'll give you a bit of a sense of the increasing concern.

Health committee  Thank you for the question. I'm going to try to see if I can tackle it. With respect to vaccine development and partnerships, I would say that I'm not fully aware of all the details of how Canada is looking at vaccine development, perhaps, with the Government of China or with scientific groups in China.

Health committee  In the technology that we've developed, and I'm going back to that metaphor of smoke detector and fire extinguisher, we've really been focusing much more on developing the early warning systems that could give us a signal that there is a threat coming. COVID-19 is here now and we're all very well aware of it and we're now sort of more in firefighting mode, grabbing the fire extinguisher to put fires out.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for the invitation to participate in today's session. As you just heard, my name is Dr. Kamran Khan. I am BlueDot's founder and CEO. I'm joined by my colleague Alex Demarsh, who is BlueDot's director of data science. I’d like to begin my opening remarks with some background information to help provide some important context for today’s conversation.

Information & Ethics committee  Through you, Mr. Chair, to the honourable member, on the data we collected in the context of the Canadian response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was approximately five million devices in total.

Information & Ethics committee  Alex, do you want to take that question?