Canada’s top doctor told CBC News the federal government could have made earlier efforts to keep the COVID-19 pandemic from sweeping across the country — but moves to close borders and screen travellers for the illness sooner might not have made much of a difference.
Canada’s top doctor told CBC News the federal government could have made earlier efforts to keep the COVID-19 pandemic from sweeping across the country — but moves to close borders and screen travellers for the illness sooner might not have made much of a difference.
In a wide-ranging interview, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam told CBC News that simply shutting the border to travellers from China and other COVID-19 hotspots earlier wouldn’t have stopped the virus from coming in from other countries — and that expecting officials to identify travellers at the border with virus symptoms was “unlikely.”
She also said the closure of the Canada/U.S. border did not happen sooner because it wasn’t part of the government’s pandemic preparedness plan.
“Could we have done more at the time? You can retrospectively say yes, absolutely, you could screen more, or you could change your stance. But at the time we had very, very few cases globally and in Canada,” Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam told the CBC’s Rosemary Barton.
Watch: Dr. Theresa Tam in conversation with the CBC’s Rosemary Barton
During her first sit-down interview since the COVID-19 crisis began, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam tells CBC’s chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton that some pandemic measures could have been better executed and could have happened sooner. 1:43
The World Health Organization (WHO) was reporting by mid-January that human-to-human transmission of COVID-19 was possible, but Canada continued to let in Chinese travellers — some from Hubei province, the source of China’s outbreak.
While Tam acknowledged that many Canadians believed that shutting the border “would solve the problem,” the virus “had already traveled somewhere else” by that time — something that became obvious when cases st