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 conta

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 sys

Health committee  Given the regional differences, what we did, together with the special advisory committee, was establish the criteria upon which jurisdictions can look at easing the public health measures. All chief medical officers were very cognizant of the unintended consequences of public h

Health committee  This is an area that I've really stressed to Statistics Canada and the Canadian Institute for Health Information. You may have seen that Statistics Canada has released the initial quarter numbers for excess mortality in their reports. Of course, in the first quarter, the epidemic

Health committee  A lot of things have happened, and I just want to maybe look back at the records of when I last appeared. I think some of them were estimates, but I think March 11 was the last time and much has happened. We do have a team at the agency that keeps us apprised of the outcomes and

Health committee  The fundamentals of infection prevention control have always been there; that's existing. Precautions, that's already well published. Managing viruses, such as coronavirus that spreads through the respiratory droplet route.... All that was available. However, with the experienc

Health committee  Yes. Absolutely, that is a Canadian pandemic influenza plan. The Canadian health system, as you know, is not just the federal, but provincial and territorial systems as well, and each of the provinces have their own stockpile. This is a recommendation for the country. The natio

Health committee  Again, the national emergency stockpile system went into full gear and to getting all the supplies we needed, and there was a global shortage. I think going forward, I would like to see support for the national emergency stockpile system and the public health system writ large. G

Health committee  At the time, the concept—and the global concept—was containment at source, which meant to control as much as possible the outbreak at the source in China. That was critical, so the federal government did make a donation at the time.

Health committee  I'm not sure I can speak to that. All I can say is that particular set of PPE was probably not going to be usable, as it were, based on the standards at the time, in a very short time frame.

Health committee  I don't think that was necessarily the case, but, as we said, expired stock and near-expired stock normally would not have been used in the Canadian context. Going forward—

Health committee  Going forward, though, we are doing everything we can, including Health Canada providing instructions on expired stock, and even resterilizing certain equipment as well. So we're pulling out all the stops on that.

Health committee  Right from the start, from when we knew about the cluster in Wuhan, we had been escalating the Canadian preparedness because we didn't.... There was an uncertainty as to what was going to happen.

Health committee  The risk assessment at the time—

Health committee  The risk assessment at the time, in terms of the domestic transmission, was low because we actually didn't have many cases in Canada at the time. So that was not the global—