CANADA'S AT THE BACK OF THE PACK.

This week, as news coverage focused on U.S. election results, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) discreetly updated its COVID-19 guidelines on aerosol transmission.

That is good because the federal recommendations did not previously mention airborne spread of the virus, which was a glaring gap in PHAC's instructions.

But it is a reminder of the troubling way Canada has trailed the rest of the world during the pandemic.

Credible concerns about aerosol transmission of the coronavirus were raised as early as March. At the time, we were being told the novel coronavirus (and it was a lot more novel back then, let me tell you) could be contracted in only one of two ways: by breathing in large respiratory droplets that don't linger in the air (the kind you have to be less than six feet away from an infected person to inhale before they fall to the ground) or by touching contaminated surfaces (including people).

It did not take long for both experts and laypeople to point out that this theory failed to explain the many accounts that were starting to surface about significant numbers of people becoming infected after having attended large gatherings where decent physical distancing was observed. (One of the best examples was an incident in Skagit County, Wash., where 56 members of a local choir got together in a big room with plenty of hand sanitizer and space between chairs for a single choral practice. Within a couple of weeks, at least 45 of them had been diagnosed with COVID-19.) What would account for such cases was airborne transmission.

The public health acknowledgment of the threat of coronavirus spreading through the air was slow, in general. It took the World Health Organization until July before it started including the danger of aerosols causing COVID-19 outbreaks in its guidelines; and it might have taken the agency even longer had it not received an open letter from over 200 scientists from around the world imploring it to get with the aerosol program.

The United States was even slower; the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidance about airborne transmission only a month ago, finally noting that poor ventilation and activities such as singing and exercising (which cause heavy breathing) pose a risk. But Canada is the true laggard, not getting around to overhauling its guidelines until this first week of November, and doing so in a bizarrely hushed way, as though it half hoped no one would notice.

The Canadian public health higher ups are trying to casually brush off their slow pace.

On Tuesday, Canada's Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam recommended the use of three-layer masks. It was a belated reaction to the now long-standing knowledge that aerosols contribute to the spread of coronavirus. (The extra mask layers filter out the smaller particles generated through coughs, shouts, or performances of arias.) But Tam was blasé, saying, “I do think that because it's winter, because we're all going inside, we're learning more about droplets and aerosols.” Would it have killed Tam and PHAC to have embarked on this learning in the spring, even if many of us were taking outdoor strolls at the time? Scientists around the world managed to educate themselves without waiting for the autumnal equinox to pass; why couldn't Canada?

“The science of masks has really accelerated during this particular pandemic,” mused a calm Tam on Tuesday. “So we're just learning again as we go.”

In a pandemic involving a new virus, learning as you go is inevitable, but it must happen at the same accelerated pace as the science, not as a serene afterthought once the conclusion has become so obvious as to be impossible to ignore any longer.

This country's pandemic response should be improving with time. The federal public health apparatus has now had more than eight months to observe, assess, and plan. Notwithstanding some unsettling news about Danish mink herds Wednesday, there has been no significant mutation observed in the coronavirus. There have, unfortunately, been more than 250,000 Canadian coronavirus cases to study.

But, remarkably, none of that has led to a functional testing apparatus or even remotely successful infection control. Rapid antigen tests are the key to effective COVID screening, but Canada has still approved only one version, the Panbio made by Abbott Rapid Diagnostics in Germany. Health Canada continues to drag its heels on giving the OK for the more convenient saliva test made by a small Nova Scotia company called SONA Nanotech.

Sadly the only thing we can count on Canada's public health and health brass for during this pandemic is being at the back of the pack.