The spread of SARS from a single patient in Birchmount’s Emergency Department is a “painful memory,” and nobody at Scarborough Health Network wants a repeat with the coronavirus, says the hospital’s chief of staff.

Dr. Dick Zoutman, an expert on infectious diseases who was chairperson of the SARS Scientific Advisory Committee during the outbreak, doesn’t think a repeat is possible.

“There’s a huge corporate memory here. Everybody knows we have to be well prepared, and we are,” he said last Friday, before health officials announced the first case of coronavirus from Wuhan, China had been confirmed at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.

In 2003, a commission later concluded, a single patient left for 16 hours in the ER of what was then The Scarborough Hospital’s Grace Division transmitted SARS to other patients, “sparking a chain of infection that spread through the Scarborough Grace Hospital, then to other hospitals through patient transfers and ultimately killed 44 and sickened more than 330 others.”

Since then, the Scarborough Health Network has engineered isolation rooms in its ERs — which now includes Centenary as well as the Birchmount and General — and made certain infectious disease control is “baked into everything we do,” Zoutman said.

That includes asking arrivals at the Birchmount about symptoms if they're coughing, sneezing or exhibiting shortness of breath. People with these symptoms are put in isolation, all the time, said Zoutman.

Drills with people acting as patients are going on at all three campuses.

“We critique each other, we watch each other,” Zoutman said of the staff. “I’m quite impressed with the dedication to the situation.”

He added that, though more up-to-date information is needed, the Wuhan coronavirus is genetically only 71-per-cent related to the SARS virus, and seems to behave differently.

It doesn’t seem as lethal as SARS, Zoutman said.

The SARS outbreak put a great strain on health-care workers in Scarborough.

Tecla-Lai Yin Lin, a nurse who worked at the Birchmount, died after volunteering to care for 14 infected co-workers at another Toronto facility.

Zoutman said Scarborough Health Network is paying attention to the welfare of its staff, wanting to make sure they feel supported and safe, which he said includes getting the best available information on the virus to them.

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