health emergency

policy response

health resilience

infectious disease

public health emergency

The Lancet

The 2003 SARS epidemic killed 44 people in Canada, and led to many proposals for reforms. Paul Webster looks at how the SARS outbreak has affected Canada's COVID-19 response. In an exclusive interview with The Lancet, David Naylor, one of Canada's leading experts on pandemic control, says Canada's response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is vastly benefiting from the country's experience with a 2003 epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) that killed 44 Canadians. In October, 2003, after the SARS epidemic, Naylor and a group of Canada's top epidemic control experts made a sweeping set of recommendations to Canada's federal, provincial, and territorial leader in a report titled Learning from SARS. Canada's public health and epidemic control systems have been largely refashioned around those recommendations since then. Most prominently, the recommendations made by Naylor and his co-authors led to the creation of the Public Health Agency of Canada, which now leads the response to COVID-19, with at least 324 Canadian patients as of March 16. “I'd say the government of Canada responded in some concrete way to about 80% of the recommendations in the 2003 report”, Naylor, who is a former dean of medicine and former president of the University of Toronto, where he is a professor emeritus, told The Lancet. The response to the recommendations made by Naylor and his co-panellists to “provide the necessary funding for renovation to achieve minimal facility standards for infection control in emergency departments” and to “ensure that each hospital has sufficient negative pressure rooms for treatment of patients with infectious disease” has been uneven, says Michael Schull, president of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences and an emergency department physician at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto. “One of the biggest lessons of SARS was that it is imperative to reduce all avoidable hospitalisations ahead of the outbreak, and treat patients at home as much as possible”, says Schull. “I don't think we'...

Canada and COVID-19: learning from SARS