Quebec’s senior public health officials on Thursday sought to explain decisions made in the early stages of the pandemic, when the coronavirus ravaged the province’s long-term care home system.
During a public inquiry into the system, Dr Horacio Arruda, the province’s director of public health, insisted that the safety of the elderly was their top priority in spring 2020.
Arruda was pressed, in particular, to find out why the province was banning caregivers from going to long-term care homes and why staff who had come into contact with COVID-19 patients had been ordered to go to long-term care homes. isolate for 14 days, even if they did not show symptoms. .
Previous witnesses said these two decisions exacerbated staff shortages at the start of the crisis
Coroner Géhane Kamel also asked why the province had not put in place a plan to postpone health care appointments and elective surgeries to free up additional staff to help in long-term care homes .
Arruda responded that the situation was complex and that he was unable to speak for the whole system as his work is about public health rather than the organization of the health network.
But he stressed that the pandemic was “historic” in nature.
At the start of his long-awaited testimony, the director of public health retraced what he knew about the virus from January 2020 to April of the same year.
He recounted how unclear the potential risk was at first and that as the virus began to spread in Quebec there was an international shortage of personal protective equipment and masks.
Also until the end of March 2020, it was believed that the virus was spread mainly through people with symptoms.
The “better protected” hospital system
The inquest heard previous witnesses criticize the province’s slow response to the onset of the pandemic, as well as its inability to grasp the severity of what was to come or predict that seniors would be adversely affected.
Thursday morning, Dr Richard Massé, Arruda’s strategic medical adviser, acknowledged that the hospital system was “better protected” than the EHPAD network during the first wave.
When asked if the province’s response was “optimal” after seeing what was happening in Europe and China, Massé said the province was following other jurisdictions closely, but that the first scientific literature on the coronavirus was not always complete.
Massé said the province struggled to secure personal protective equipment during the early days of the pandemic, when there was a “fierce battle” over things like masks and testing.
Even though authorities had had enough protective gear, he said it was not clear whether they would have known the best ways to use it.
“There were people who said: ‘we believe it is transmitted by asymptomatic people’, but there was no consensus,” he said, adding that neither state authorities Neither the United States nor the World Health Organization have recognized asymptomatic spread as an important mode of transmission.
Public health officials, he said, had no idea how quickly the virus was spreading in long-term care facilities, including the Herron Seniors’ Residence, a home for the elderly. private long-term care where 47 people died.
Questions blocked due to firm confidentiality
Patient rights advocate Paul Brunet told the inquiry last week that he considered Arruda’s handling of the early days of the pandemic – alongside then health minister Danielle McCann – was so horrible that he filed a criminal complaint with the Provincial Police accusing them of negligence.
Brunet said the province should never have transferred hundreds of patients from hospitals to CHSLDs during the first wave.
He also said he should have stocked more personal protective equipment, instituted mass testing in nursing homes earlier and allowed family caregivers to continue visiting loved ones.
Brunet said failure to take these measures contributed to the deaths of thousands of elderly people.
The investigation attempted to obtain answers to some of these questions on Wednesday, but was blocked by a lawyer for the Department of Health.
Jocelyne Sauvé, specialist at the provincial public health institute, testified on various scenarios presented by the institute to the ministry during a meeting on March 9, 2020.
At one point, the ministry’s lawyer objected, saying discussing these scenarios would violate Cabinet confidentiality rules.
Kamel agreed to stop questions at this point, although the coroner said she hoped to come to a compromise so these scenarios could eventually be shared with the inquest.
“I do not feel at all that we are in the field of parliamentary privilege,” Kamel said, stressing that being prevented from seeing these scenarios could give the impression that his investigation lacks transparency.
“Travel aficionado. Twitter scholar. Writer. Extreme coffee guru. Evil pop culture fanatic.”