Canada's top doc admits authorities were slow to act in closing the borders in response to COVID-19.Dr. Theresa Tam, the country's chief public health officer, said that quicker action could have been taken in responding to the global pandemic.
"The virus itself (was) travelling across the world very fast," she told the standing Commons committee on health on Tuesday.
Noting that the virus' epicentre was in China early in the pandemic, it wasn't until cases started appearing in Europe and the United States that she says sparked real concern in public health circles over it spreading to Canada.
"At that time, because of a very few cases, we were doing incremental measures."
Critics have argued that Canada's reaction to COVID-19 was haphazardly slow, full of contradictory messaging and following the lead of both the World Health Organization and the Chinese government. China has come under fire for allegedly downplaying the dangers while the rest of the world scrambled to contain its spread.
On March 5, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau defended the decision to keep the borders open, dismissing calls to close them as "knee-jerk reactions" that were not required to keep people safe.
Two days after the U.S. declared a national emergency on March 13, Health Minister Patty Hajdu criticized calls to close the border, calling such measures "ineffective" against a global pandemic.
Airports in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan had started quarantining Chinese travellers by
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