Canada monitors mystery virus discovered in China

Seventeen years after SARS killed 44 Canadians and sickened hundreds of others, Canadian officials are closely monitoring a new potential threat — a mysterious virus based in China that has caused atypical pneumonia in at least 59 people.

So far, Chinese officials have ruled out SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), which also began in China in 2002. They have also ruled out bird flu, influenza and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, among other potential causes. Officials say there is no evidence yet that it has spread from human to human.

But the world is watching closely.

Not just because there are so many unanswered questions about the cluster of undiagnosed viral pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China, but because global infectious disease officials have long warned that another pandemic is coming.

Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam has been in touch with provincial and territorial public health officials, the World Health Organization and other international partners to discuss the mysterious virus, said Eric Morrissette, spokesman for the Public Health Agency of Canada.

The Ontario Ministry of Health is also monitoring the situation, said spokesman David Jensen.

“As the situation develops, the ministry will continue to assess and determine whether any further action is needed,” said Jensen.

Could this become a global public health threat? For now, public health officials are watching and trying to get more information.

But the virus in Wuhan should serve as a wake-up call about the implications of overcrowding in Ontario hospitals for outbreaks or a pandemic, said Dr. Alan Drummond, a Perth emergency physician who is co-chair of public affairs for the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians.

Ontario is not ready for such a public health crisis, said Drummond, who has been raising awareness about hospital overcrowding in the province and across Canada.

Drummond said Ontario would be highly vulnerable during a new pandemic because of chronically overcrowded hospitals.

A Public Health Agency of Canada spokesman notes that numerous system improvements have been made since the SARS outbreak, which killed 774 people worldwide, 44 of them in Toronto. Those changes include new and improved systems in Canadian provinces and territories to “identify, prevent and control the spread of serious infectious diseases into and within Canada.”

Post-SARS protections also include a global public health intelligence monitoring system, which scans the world’s open source media, in addition to international collaboration and information sharing across Canada, Morrissette said.

“The Canadian public health laboratory system is well-equipped to detect serious infectious diseases,” he added.

Other post-SARS changes include screening patients coming into emergency rooms for infectious diseases and having rooms designed to contain infectious patients.

Those kinds of initiatives are positive, said Drummond, but do not overcome the lack of space in hospitals.

“I would worry greatly that the best laid plans of mice and men are going to be scuppered because we do not have bed capacity.”

Hospitals are so overcrowded that Drummond said he could foresee military tents having to be set up in some hospital parking lots to deal with surge capacity if Ontario was hit by a serious pandemic.

To have safe occupancy rates and allow for busier periods, Drummond said hospitals should be operating around 85 per cent capacity most of the time. But in Ontario, most hospitals are closer to 100 per cent capacity or higher. In Ottawa, that has had a cascading impact on ambulances, which have been forced to repeatedly declare code zero, meaning no ambulances are available, because paramedics are waiting for patients to be admitted.

“The code zeros for ambulances are bad now. How bad is it going to be if we have a pandemic?”

The Ontario Hospital Association recently published a report outlining the impact of years of flatlined and insufficient funding for hospitals in the province and noted that Ontario has fewer hospital beds per 1,000 people than any other Canadian province and fewer beds than any other country in the world except Mexico, with which it is tied.

The report said Ontario’s hospitals are the most efficient in the country but the worsening situation is not sustainable.

The Ontario Hospital Association report cites population growth and an aging population as two reasons for increasing waits at emergency departments across the province.

Drummond said demographics are not the only reason to be concerned about long wait times in emergency departments, overcapacity hospitals and hallway health care. Hospitals also have to be concerned about “what is lurking in the shadows” — the possibility of a future pandemic.

Most hospitals have no wiggle room, he said.

“That is my concern. We talk about the patient in the hallway and the misery of crowded waiting rooms. But when we say no surge capacity what we mean is one major epidemic and we are screwed.”

When we say no surge capacity what we mean is one major epidemic and we are screwed.