Infection specialists held back by politics

Bureaucratic turf concerns prevented a highly trained team of infection prevention and control experts from helping Ontario long-term care homes in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, an independent commission has heard.

Dr. Gary Garber, the former medical director of infection prevention and control at Public Health Ontario, testified last week that his department was asked to maintain a “low profile” in order to avoid being “subsumed” by the newly created Ontario Health.

The reorganization, which the province said would modernize the health-care system and save millions of dollars, occurred on Jan. 22, 2020.

The next day, a Toronto hospital admitted the first patient in Canada with the novel coronavirus.

In March, when a growing number of long-term care homes throughout province were reporting COVID-19 outbreaks, Garber said 25 to 30 highly trained experts from Public Health Ontario watched from the sidelines.

“At the time, I was explaining it to people that COVID really was the IPAC (infection prevention and control) Olympics, that we had people who had been training for years,” Garber told the Long-term Care COVID-19 Commission.

Instead, he said, the team was told not to get involved.

“We were basically told, ‘No, we don’t have the bandwidth for that. No, we can’t do that. No, it’s ... the health unit’s responsibility to do that.’ “

Public Health Ontario said in a statement it did not prohibit its infection prevention specialists from going into nursing homes, but it noted that “with a small team at PHO, it was not possible to meet every request.”

Hearings are not open to the public, but transcripts of testimony are posted online days or weeks later.