Virus response shows unprecedented collaboration

I am responding to Bruce Arthur’s column about Ontario’s public health strategy in response to COVID-19. I was disappointed to read this column and believe that our COVID-19 response demonstrates an unprecedented collaboration across all levels of government, our health-care system and community.

It also demonstrates our ability as a city to come together and work through extreme challenges that none of us have ever faced before.

Case investigation and contact management is core public health work and critical to our COVID-19 response.

It helps us to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in our city. When a patient gets a test for COVID-19, it is sent to a lab for testing. The physician who ordered the test receives the result and it is their obligation to notify the patient. This is part of the health provider-patient relationship.

Under the Health Protection and Promotion Act, the physician is required to notify local public health if they know or suspect that a patient has a reportable disease, including COVID-19.

The lab also shares this responsibility to report to local public health.

As soon as my team is notified of a positive case, they act on this information immediately to begin the case and contact management process.

Unfortunately, the path from patient testing to the notification of public health is not always smooth.

This can result in delays in the case and contact management process.

Given the significance of timely case and contact management, especially as the province continues to reopen, my team is actively reaching out to the province, local labs, hospitals and assessment centres during this emergency to address this matter.

While public health is responsible for case and contact management, health providers also play an important role in our COVID-19 battle.

When physicians are informing a patient about their positive lab results, they should also tell them to isolate and to advise the others in their household to stay home. These actions help reduce virus spread in our community.

Whether it is COVID-19 or any other communicable disease, we work hand-in-hand with clinicians, and consider their work a critical part of our public-health response.

As Dr. Warner and Arthur note, we need to move forward with the utmost care and caution in reopening the city.

We cannot take our progress for granted and we need to continue to monitor our data. We need to be ready for flare ups in our journey from COVID-19 response to COVID-19 recovery.

We are moving in the right direction, and we must continue to support each other as we navigate this challenging and unprecedented situation together.