An important position at the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) was vacant and the country’s pandemic early warning system was understaffed when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, an independent panel has found.
The final report on what went wrong at that key moment with the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) — a multilingual monitoring system that scours the internet for reports of infectious diseases — was released today.
The report says that, among other things, surveillance was not well co-ordinated in the four years leading up to the arrival of the novel coronavirus, a problem the report says was partly due to the fact that a key position — chief health surveillance officer — had been left vacant since 2017 and was due to be eliminated.
