Matt Gurney: Health officials can reassure us all they want, but our system failed

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Matt Gurney: Health officials can reassure us all they want, but our system failed
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The very first part of the coronavirus system that our health officials are so keen to tell us all about isn’t only not working, it can’t work, period

If there was one message Canadians were meant to take away from the update by Health Canada officials on Sunday morning, one day after the announcement that a presumptive case of Wuhan virus has been isolated in a Toronto hospital, it was that we have a system.

The actual information presented at the conference, featuring Health Minister Patty Hadju and Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, can be summed up concisely. The patient, a man in his 50s, had recently returned to Toronto from China. He was showing symptoms while on the flight to North America, but still got through the enhanced screening in place at Pearson International Airport. He went home and, a day later, to hospital, where he was immediately isolated.

That didn’t happen here, and it probably can’t. We have to be realistic. Any system that relies on honestly and self-reporting by people with a strong reason to lie isn’t going to be 100 per cent effective. That’s not the government’s fault. The grim truth is that what we know so far about this still-unnamed virus suggests that it’s going to be difficult to contain, if not impossible. The Chinese experience so far shows that it can spread rapidly.

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nationalpost /  🏆 10. in CA

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