Canada must act now to be prepared for the next health emergency, new pandemic report warns

Canada needs to learn from the COVID-19 pandemic and take action before the next health emergency strikes, an expert panel of doctors and researchers say in a new independent report.

"Most scientists feel that it's only a matter of time before we face something similar to what we went through these past five years," said Dr. Fahad Razak, one of the six experts who contributed to the report examining how scientific advice was developed and how research was co-ordinated.

"A lot of what we saw globally when we compared [pandemic] responses suggests that the preparedness is the critical part."

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

"The fragmented nature of how we govern this country, with separate decisions being made in provinces and territories and what's being done at the federal government [level], had really significant impact on how we responded to the pandemic," said Razak, an internal medicine specialist at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto who was the scientific director of the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table.

The availability of health data varied across the country during the pandemic, making it "very difficult for us to get a national picture of what was happening," he said in an interview on Tuesday. 

The report also says Canada needs to create a single, permanent scientific advisory group — something that's been done in the U.K. — instead of trying to pull together that expertise in the middle of an epidemic.

"There's only so much that you can do in the middle of a crisis. People are desperate, infrastructure does not work as well when there's a crisis," Razak said.

The report says the "absence of pre-existing emergency protocols for science advice in Canada caused significant delays" and better co-ordination was needed "within and across all levels of government."

Having scientific advisory groups federally and provincially communicating separately "resulted in multiple streams of advice," said the report, which was released by the agency on Thursday. It had been requested by Health Canada last August.

The report also recommended that evolving health information should be shared much more quickly with the public.

"I think the pandemic was a perfect example of if you don't publicly release that information, it breeds mistrust and disinformation," said Razak.

"[The scientific advisory group's] communication to government should be released to the public almost as quickly as you generate it," he said.

"You want the public to be confident that they are also being provided with the best available scientific evidence."