As COVID-19 quietly incubated in Wuhan, China, last fall, public health officials in Canada were looking for gaps that needed to be closed in their long effort to upgrade this country’s online pandemic early warning system.
As COVID-19 quietly incubated in Wuhan, China, last fall, public health officials in Canada were looking for gaps that needed to be closed in their long effort to upgrade this country’s online pandemic early warning system.
Few people outside of a tight circle of highly-specialized epidemiologists and federal bureaucrats had ever heard of the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) before the novel coronavirus became a global pandemic.
That’s probably going to change now.
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The online, multilingual monitoring and analysis unit, which scours the Internet for media reports of infectious diseases, has been a crucial pandemic tripwire for both Canada and the World Health Organization (WHO).
The network delivered its first report about COVID-19 on Dec. 31, 2019 — one day after a similar online monitoring network known as ProMED issued its notification.
CBC News has obtained a series of internal public health agency documents and slide-presentation decks — including one given by a senior epidemiologist from the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) last November on the eve of a pandemic that has since killed tens of thousands and crippled the world economy.
Network needed a tech upgrade
The documents bring into sharper focus the kind of information key decision-makers had at their fingertips as the outbreak started in China and raise questions about how seriously global pandemic preparedness was being taken within the federal government.
The records show GPHIN was in the middle of a long-overdue technology upgrade as the virus was spreading.
Despite almost four years of work with the National Research Council of Canada, the early warning system was — as of last fall — still in need of “improvement in the geographical and time tagging algorithm,” according to a Nov 12, 2019 presentation to a WHO conference in Seoul, South Korea by senior epidemiologist Florence Tanguay.
That algorithm is crucial to the system’s ability to sort through as many as 7,000 online articles per day to spot disease outbreaks around the globe.
The network also was awaiting an “expansion to new data sources,” such as social media feeds. From its inception in the late 1990s, GPHIN had relied on news wire services and later local media articles posted online.
Network’s first alert came from a media report
At the time when GPHIN and ProMED issued their COVID-19 notices, little was known about how deadly or contagious the outbreak might be — but the early signs were ominous.
The International Society for Infectious Diseases, which runs ProMED, cited multiple urgent notices from official Chinese sources. One came from the Wuhan Municipal Health Committee, which warned that “multiple patients had been isolated” and medical institutions in China should be on the lookout for respiratory inf