if the virus does spread, there is some good news. china appears to be sharing more information — at least relative to 2003. our technology has improved considerably over the past 17 years. sequencing the virus’s genome is easier now than it was then, and we’ll be able to share that information more widely, faster, speeding treatment and diagnosis options. the lessons learned from sars will also, one hopes, make it easier to screen arriving passengers at canadian airports, reducing the likelihood that the virus will ever arrive here at all.
that’s the good news. now the bad.
the health canada report identified many major problems in the public health response to sars’ arrival in canada. information sharing was limited, many medical records were still pen-and-paper, and chains of command were muddled and unclear, causing confusion and delays. we can hope to do better this time, but it’s hard to have too much confidence that we would. and one of the report’s major conclusions is a red light flashing an urgent alarm.
the report tells the story of the second canadian case, and likely the first infected here. his elderly mother had travelled to hong kong, and became infected there, after being exposed to sars in her hotel. she returned to canada, fell ill and died at home in toronto. canadian officials, unaware of sars’ spread in china, deemed her death unremarkable — an old woman dying at home. her son fell ill and went to the hospital, where he infected two others during a long emergency room stay. why the long stay? hospital overcrowding. the er doctor was clever, the report writes, and suspected tuberculosis, taking precautions accordingly, including notifying public health authorities and recommending that other family members be isolated. but the poor doomed patient waited around in that er for almost a full day, infecting others, because there was nowhere else to put him.