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. The various public health agencies have been communicating well, the patient is isolated at Toronto’s excellent Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, biological samples from the patient are being immediately analyzed, with results expected by Monday, and public health officials are working quickly to identify and contact anyone who was sitting near the man on the transoceanic flight. The patient is, by all accounts, doing well in hospital. His family members are being monitored.
It all sounds reassuring. That was certainly the point of the entire exercise. “The risk (to the broader public) is low,” was the unofficial slogan of the entire event. But the reassuring words about co-ordination and communication can’t hide the awkward truth — the “system” the officials were so cheerfully describing didn’t work. A man flying back from an epidemic hot zone — and who was actively symptomatic upon arrival at an airport that was on the alert — was screened by officials who were fully aware of the danger … and who then let him into the country.
That’s the failure here. That’s the issue of concern. Everything else that happens afterward — the immediate isolation of the patient, the rapid testing of his samples, the strong communication among health agencies — is nice but not the point. Lauding the emergency response after a preventable incident rings hollow when the point is to avoid the emergency in the first place.
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