How prepared was Canada? - Macleans.ca

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Paul Wells: Last year, Canada's Chief Public Health Officer wrote a paper on how to plan for a major outbreak. It didn't imagine anything as menacing as this coronavirus.

Tam takes part in a press conference on Parliament Hill during the COVID-19 pandemic on May 8, 2020

She does say, in passing, that “it can be difficult to convince decision-makers to invest upstream in non-specific emergency preparedness resources,” which is a polite way of saying that people in Tam’s line of work rarely get the budgets they want from distracted politicians. But if all you were looking for was controversy, that would be pretty weak beer.

Mostly Tam’s goal was to warn health administrators to be ready for surprise. “There will be many unknowns at the start” of any outbreak, she writes. So being prepared “is about applying the approaches that we have learned from previous events,” while being prepared to drop anything that doesn’t work, or to do a lot more of what does.

Strikingly, Tam pauses here to emphasize that you can’t just throw everything you have at every new bug that shows up. There are simply too many emerging diseases. “A key lesson learned from past responses is that uncertainty and/or risk aversion can lead to overcompensation during a response,” she wrote. Starting too big could lead to “inappropriate use of limited resources” and “responder burnout.

And since 2003, scares have been fairly frequent—and never really all that bad. The 2009 outbreak of a novel H1N1 flu virus, beginning in Mexico, wasn’t as deadly for Canada as SARS. Nor was Ebola in 2013, nor Zika in 2016. In, published online by the Public Health Agency of Canada, Tam described Canada’s institutional response to each of those alerts.

In the year following the 2016 opioid summit, 26 informal overdose-prevention sites opened in storefronts and tents across the country. Each of those sites operated in violation of federal law, though sympathetic local police rarely enforced the law against them. They sprung up because community activists got fed up with waiting for governments to act while their friends died.

 

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Considering that she gets marching orders from the WHO, is this a surprise ChinaLiedPeopleDied

MENACING? REALLY? Mortality rates PLEASE. Only then use such sensationalistic term.

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Source: CTVNews - 🏆 1. / 99 Read more »