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Jan. 31: The NDP’s Davies asks in Health Committee: “So far, we’ve been focused on people coming from Hubei province. Now, with the possibility that this virus is going to other countries that may not have the same vigilance — and I think there’s been quite a consensus that China has done a very good job of containing this — how do we respond to passengers who are perhaps coming from countries that may not have the same rigorous standards to deal with this? How has that affected our border entry controls and how we might be dealing with that?”

Photo by Christopher Black/WHO/Handout via Reuters

Paul MacKinnon, executive vice-president of the Canada Border Services Agency replies to Davies: “Our officers are trained from the moment they join (the agency) to do this very work on a daily basis, so in some sense, they rely on their standard operating procedure to always be checking for individuals who may be arriving at Canadian airports showing signs of illness. Certainly we are more focused on the questioning we have about whether they are coming from Hubei province. That questioning is working well for us at this point.”

Jan. 31: Liberal MP Powlowski asks of MacKinnon: “You seem to be gaining all of your identifying of passengers — asking questions, following them up — specifically with people from Wuhan or Hubei province. I would question why you’re limiting it to this group rather than all of China.” He notes the hundreds of other confirmed cases in other parts of China.

Davies asks if border guards had a list of the then 24 countries where the virus has spread.

Mackinnon says, “At the border we do not have such a list.”

Feb. 3

Dr. Tam continues to defend Canada’s policy of screening for symptomatic passengers only from Hubei province and voluntary self-isolation for only those sick individuals: “The most effective piece of containment, of course, is at source, in China itself, where you’re seeing some of the extraordinary measures that are being taken. As you move further away from that epicentre, any other border measures are much less effective. Data on public health has shown that many of these are actually not effective at all. We are doing some of those and adding those layers, but each of those layers is not a complete barrier, if you like. We have provided travel health advice from a health perspective to indicate to travellers to avoid the province of Hubei and to limit non-essential travel to the rest of China. That advice is provided to travellers…WHO advises against any kind of travel and trade restrictions, saying that they are inappropriate and could actually cause more harm than good in terms of our global effort to contain.”

The timeline continues for February 2020 (click here.).

The Road to Canada’s COVID-19 outbreak: