Pandemic early warning system has issued only a handful of alerts since start of 2020
CBC
The country's pandemic early warning system has issued only a handful of alerts — most of them unrelated to deadly variants of COVID-19 — since facing intense public scrutiny and criticism from Canada's auditor general, new federal documents show.
Records obtained by CBC News under access to information reveal that between January 2020 and May 2021, the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) delivered only five infectious disease alerts to its nearly 900 subscribers worldwide.
The early warning system had stopped issuing bulletins and was largely silent throughout 2020 — just prior to and during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic — but resumed in the fall of last year following widespread criticism.
It had been muzzled the year before by a series of internal decisions at the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC). The agency wanted the surveillance system — which scours the internet for signs of infectious disease outbreaks — to focus more on domestic health concerns.
Of the five bulletins that were issued, only one of them — sent on Nov. 4, 2020 — signaled concern about a possible coronavirus variant that reportedly had appeared on a mink farm in Denmark and may have made the leap from animals to humans.
The other alerts involved an outbreak of H5N1 bird flu in Russia, a tick-borne viral infection in China and reports of an unknown disease in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In contrast, ProMED — an internet surveillance program belonging to the International Society for Infectious Diseases (ISID) — has issued dozens of alerts over the same period of time. Some of those ProMED alerts have been about highly transmissible and lethal coronavirus variants.