Lessons learned from Katrina, 9/11, SARS, and other disasters
SHUTE: Thank you. I'm hearing you saying that you all lost major components of your healthcare system. Dr. Weisfuse, you lost your lab. Most of the hospitals in Toronto were shut down and not accepting new patients at that time. Maybe we can talk a little bit about what happens when you do lose a big chunk of your healthcare infrastructure and how you could see working around that the next time. Dr. Low?
LOW: Yeah, I mean, one of the early decisions made was to cancel all elective surgery, elective therapies, and diagnostic procedures, which in hindsight I think was a mistake. I mean, our outbreak lasted for over eight weeks, and it was difficult for people to come to grips with. It was fine to do that the first few days, but really coming to grips with what really is the risk to these patients, and they needed their chemotherapy, they needed their diagnostic tests, and some of them needed admission for surgery. And we just closed that down, and we were afraid to open it up, and it paralyzed the healthcare system. We had two hospitals in the first two weeks that closed completely to all admissions.
And this fear, this fear of the unknown and how is it being transmitted, and the fact is because at the end of the day half of our healthcare workers were the victims. We had only 380 cases, which doesn't sound much when we think about a pandemic, but half of those were healthcare workers, and so you can imagine how paralyzed you felt and the fear of trying to open this up and getting business back to normal. And I think that's – we had problems with surge capacity. We didn't have places to put patients, especially when we were closing hospitals.
And we had to deal with issues of quarantine, because was quarantine the right thing to do? And that took key people out of the equation. People like myself, and colleagues were put on quarantine for a total of ten days. And that meant we couldn't work. And a lot of healthcare workers were in the same situation. It almost paralyzed the government because early on some senior members in the government had been potentially exposed, which would have meant - because that was the policy at time - to have quarantine, and that they would have been put in quarantine.
So it's difficulty with surge capacity, identifying who is at risk, who had the disease, who didn't, and who should be put on quarantine if quarantine was going to work at all. And so as we look forward, these are all issues that we're trying to address as we look to the next pandemic.
SHUTE: Dr. Weisfuse, how about yourself? How did you work around this difficult -
WEISFUSE: Well, not only did we lose the lab for September 11th, we lost our main building, because we were only a few blocks from the World Trade Center. And so, we had to evacuate that building and were out for more than a month. And what we've dealt with since that time is trying to introduce redundancy into our system. So for example, we have another location in another borough of the city of New York where we can evacuate to if our building cannot be maintained. And we've actually drilled that where we've had to suddenly go to this other building and set up our health department and our emergency operations center in this other location.
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