Health committee  If the president is not going to answer the question, I will try. I believe the vaccine coverage increased from 92% to 99%. Now, of course, much care is taken to review the remaining individuals who are not vaccinated to figure out why they're not, and then the course of action i

Health committee  Dr. Lucas might be closer to the file, but we support, through funding mechanisms to the COVID-19 Immunity Task Force, in collaboration with many partners—including Statistics Canada and the Canadian Blood Services—in monitoring throughout the course of this pandemic the level of

Health committee  Yes, I'm always trying to be optimistic. As I've said, every pandemic ends, and we now have many more tools available to us, including a lot more knowledge on vaccines. We have so much innovation in the field. This will be one of the most studied viruses, I think, and the treat

Health committee  I think we're still learning, because you actually have to monitor over time, so you have to get the booster and then we're monitoring over time. I think what we will see is that the third booster might increase the durability of the protection, but, of course, the virus itself

Health committee  We believe it's both.

Health committee  Endemicity basically means that the virus will continue to circulate in the human population and is not eradicated, but its pattern of spread and transmission becomes more predictable and more manageable. There are no hard and fast thresholds one way or the other. The R number, t

Health committee  I think it would be done not just nationally but at the global level because this virus has to be considered internationally.

Health committee  I don't think I personally used “herd immunity”. We used different benchmarks of vaccination to inform the next sets of policies and what we could expect over the summer or in the fall, for instance, with a higher vaccination rate with two doses. Of course, with the appearance of

Health committee  Maybe I'll turn to the president to confirm, but yes, that was based on our agency. As part of the public service, we were pretty much aligned with what the federal public service vaccine coverage has been.

Health committee  The testing regime at the moment at the border, certainly for the unvaccinated, consists of a pre-arrival test and then day-one and day-eight tests. For the vaccinated, that's been shifting over time. Right now, non-U.S. individuals, or even vaccinated individuals, are getting te

Health committee  Yes. It depends on your objective, because the mandatory random testing is structured to get a good sample from different parts of the world. That is primarily to look for surveillance purposes and to look for different variants of concern. For that, you need a sample that can be

Health committee  What we have data on, of course, are the tests that we conduct on arrival. Because other countries conduct their tests pre-departure, it's not something we can collect. What we're seeing is that these percentage positive shift—

Health committee  Yes. That has been shifting over time. When omicron arrived, the percentage of positive tests actually increased quite a bit. In the partially or non-vaccinated individual—both by land and air—that number is cumulative and was 7.2% in the last week we had the complete data for. F

Health committee  Yes. Of course, I'm not in charge of the public service vaccine mandates, but I think those are the facts. I know that within the Public Health Agency, we were at about 92%, which is great. Public servants have really stepped up. That's gone up, I think, to close to 99% or therea

Health committee  I just want to clarify that prior to omicron, of course, there was the very phased easing of border measures, including the application of mandatory random testing for the vaccinated travellers. Because of omicron, those measures were increased, because we knew very little about