In the early stages of the pandemic, the country was able to ramp up testing more quickly than the United States
“We were able to control the virus better than many of our allies,” he told reporters this month. “Including, particularly, our neighbour.”He has a point. Canada’s response to the pandemic hasn’t been perfect – Quebec and Ontario suffered substantial outbreaks, authorities enlisted soldiers to help in hard-hit long-term care facilities, and Mexico was so concerned about conditions on farms that it threatened to hold back its migrant workers.
“There’s no smugness,” said Susy Hota, medical director of infection prevention and control at Toronto’s University Health Network. “We look at what’s happening to our neighbour in the south and all of us are just feeling really bad about it.”Article content continuedCanada has the natural advantage of geography: It has less than one-ninth the United States’ population. Canadians aren’t evenly distributed – two-thirds of them live within 62 miles of the U.S.
The Canadian people have been less divided and more disciplined. Some provinces and territories could have locked down sooner, analysts say, but once measures were announced, they were strict, broadly uniform and widely followed.Article content continued Gerald Evans, a professor of medicine at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, said Canada’s single-payer national health-care system also confers “distinct” advantages, allowing people to seek care for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, without fear of out-of-pocket costs.This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.Canadian officials have largely set aside partisan grievances for a “Team Canada” effort.
Merkley is the lead author of a paper that describes Canada’s response as a “rare moment of cross-partisan consensus” among political elites and the public. Long-term care homes quickly emerged as hot spots. Roughly one-fifth of Canada’s cases and more than 80% of its deaths have occurred in those facilities, according to government figures, despite repeated warnings about their vulnerabilities.
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