Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer says her agency wasn’t wrong when it rated the risk of COVID-19 to the country as low in early 2020, a ranking that the federal Auditor-General says was concerning and based on a faulty assessment tool.
At a news conference on Friday, Theresa Tam said the low-risk assessment was to show a moment in time rather than the potential risk the coronavirus posed to Canadians. However, she said her agency is now more focused on its forward-looking risk assessments, rather than only capturing the immediate risk posed by a disease.
“It was not wrong, it’s just that it is important to also provide what that future state might be like,” Dr. Tam said. Public-health agencies, she said, “need to be prediction organizations and not just being able to assess the risk of that present moment.”
