Canada must close pandemic gaps before next health crisis, experts warn – National

An expert panel of doctors and researchers says Canada must learn from the COVID-19 pandemic and take action before the next health emergency hits.

One of the six experts, Dr. Fahad Razak, says most scientists believe it is “only a matter of time” before another global health crisis strikes.

The panel report, called “The Time to Act is Now,” says disease surveillance, hospitalization data and research results need to be communicated much more effectively between the provinces, territories and the federal government.

Razak, an internal medicine specialist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, says it’s critical to share changing health information with the public much more quickly to build trust and combat the spread of misinformation.

The report says Canada must also address inequities among people most affected during emergencies, including people who are racialized, Indigenous communities, people experiencing homelessness and residents of long-term care facilities.

It says greater investment in research into how to better prioritize and support these groups, including addressing underlying health needs, is necessary.

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Canada should also create a single, permanent scientific advisory group — something that has been done in Britain — rather than trying to bring together that expertise in the middle of an epidemic, said Razak, who was the Ontario COVID-19 scientific director. Science advisory table.

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“There’s only so much you can do in the middle of a crisis. People are desperate, the infrastructure doesn’t work very well when there is a crisis,” he said in an interview on Tuesday.

“Much of what we saw globally when we compared (pandemic) responses suggests that preparedness is the critical component.”

The report states that “the lack of pre-existing emergency protocols for scientific advice in Canada caused significant delays” and that better coordination was needed “within and between all levels of government.”

Communicating separately between scientific advisory groups at the federal and provincial levels “resulted in multiple streams of advice,” said the report, which was released Friday.

The independent panel of experts’ report was requested by Health Canada.

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Razak said there are some aspects of Canada’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic to be proud of, including the use of wastewater monitoring to detect how much of the virus was present in communities.

“We were one of the pioneer countries and we certainly took it further on a larger scale than what many other countries could achieve,” he said.

But some provinces, including Ontario, have now made significant cuts to their wastewater monitoring programs, leaving many communities with “almost no data,” Razak said.

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