Health committee  Thank you. My name is Cécile Tremblay, I am an infectious disease specialist and medical microbiologist at the Centre hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal. I hold the Pfizer University of Montreal chair on HIV translational research. I have been working for decades on correl

Health committee  I would make sure that our nursing homes and long-term health care facilities be totally transformed before the second wave. We haven't finished the first wave, we're still seeing mortality in these centres. If there is a second wave, nothing is going to change because nothing h

Health committee  I agree with what Caroline just said. I was also pointing out the necessity to be more acute on the artificial intelligence. We don't use enough of these tools that could help bring together the research community in all kinds of different ways. You have those tools that are used

Health committee  One of the things that makes it the most dramatic is its capacity to create severe illness in elderlies. We were expecting pandemics like influenza, where you know what type of population the virus is going to attack, which is broad, and, of course, more at the extremity of ages.

Health committee  I don't think that's a valid argument. Masks should be worn in public places, especially on subways and buses. People had already started wearing them, so I'm disappointed with the change in position. The reality is that it's not possible to make masks available to everyone. The

Health committee  When you design a vaccine, you design it to produce antibodies that are very specific to the antigen you want to attack. When you test it, you use candidates that will likely generate high levels of antibody and with a very high potency for neutralization. Because you are enginee

Health committee  Yes, I am very optimistic about the vaccine.

Health committee  The advantage of short-term funding is what you've seen so far, money given right away to test new drugs and start the vaccine development process. That was very important and was done. What is useful in long-term funding is what you do next. For example, we need to know the dura

Health committee  If we had treatment, that would be good too. Unlike HIV, a virus that enters the host genome and then stays within the person, this is an RNA virus. It's wimpy compared with viruses like HIV. If we could have a good antiviral that could reduce its replication and render it much l

Health committee  Yes.

Health committee  For the last week or so in Quebec, since they've increased the testing numbers, they have allowed for testing of asymptomatic individuals. There are two ways of seeing this. If you go randomly in the population and test anybody who's asymptomatic, it's not really worth it, beca

Health committee  A lot of labs are working on that to evaluate the quality of the immune response. We can take for granted that there is some kind of immune response and some antibodies are being made following infection. We just don't know exactly the quality and the strength of these antibodies

Health committee  I can start and others may add. Right now what we know is that most people who have been infected will develop some kinds of antibodies. The amount of antibodies and the quality of these antibodies are not known for sure. They may vary from one person to the other. They may vary

Health committee  As for an appropriate pace, I would say the conditions set out by the World Health Organization, or WHO, for lifting restrictions are appropriate. They include a decline in the number of new cases for a period of at least 14 days and the capacity to test people and prevent the mo

Health committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to all of the committee members for inviting me to speak in front of the committee. I am a medical microbiologist and infectious disease specialist at the Centre hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal and full professor and director of the tr