#chi20during

BY CATHERINE VARNER (CHI ‘20) -- Front-line health care workers with children are grappling with difficult decisions about how to protect their families as Canada’s coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak worsens. Many were already managing a precarious work–life balance and complex child care arrangements before the pandemic. But COVID-19 has brought new challenges and anxieties. READ MORE. 

BY CATHERINE VARNER (CHI ‘20) --  Separating facts and sound advice from lies and conspiracy theories has become a non-stop challenge for health care workers on the COVID-19 frontline. READ MORE. 

BY CATHERINE VARNER (CHI ‘20) --  Efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in Canadian hospitals have produced a surprising change in emergency departments: an abrupt end to hallway medicine. Hospital corridors are no longer overflowing with stretchers. Instead, social distancing in waiting areas, virtual emergency department visits, and a clear sight-line along every hallway have become the new normal. READ MORE. 

BY CATHERINE VARNER (CHI ‘20) --  The bustling main floor of Canada’s big hospitals, with their unfettered entryways, coffee shops and fundraising tables, are now places of the past. In the pandemic, they feel more like fortresses, guarded by screeners in masks and an array of rules sure to intimidate patients and visitors. READ MORE. 

BY SANDANI HAPUHENNEDIGE (CHI ‘20) -- The uptake of a future vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 will depend on more than winning over the “vaccine hesitant.” Just as important, but often overlooked in heated debates about vaccination, are the people who are willing but unable to vaccinate their families. Efforts to boost immunization rates in recent years have tended to focus on countering the small but vocal anti-vaccination movement through education campaigns and strengthening immunization requirements for school children. READ MORE. 

BY ALLISON DANIEL (CHI ‘20) --  when COVID-19 first reached Toronto in January 2020, Canada’s infectious disease and public health experts were quick to recount the lessons they had learned from the outbreak of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) seventeen years earlier. Thanks to modern air travel and the accidental import of cases from Asia, Toronto saw a large outbreak of SARS in 2003, and few places should have been as well equipped to apply those hard lessons as Canada’s largest city, said Vivek Goel a physician and public health specialist who is now a special advisor for the University of Toronto’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. READ MORE. 

BY ALLISON DANIEL (CHI ‘20) --  Rehabilitation centres have undergone dramatic transformations over the past three months to accommodate patients recovering from COVID-19. An estimated 1 in 20 patients with COVID-19 require critical care during their illness and are likely to need extensive physical and pulmonary rehabilitation after the fact. READ MORE. 

BY ALLISON DANIEL (CHI ‘20) --  Malawi has a unique claim to COVID-19 fame: it is the only country in the world to announce a lockdown, and then cancel it before the restrictions came into force. President Arthur Peter Mutharika declared a state of emergency on March 20 before health authorities reported any cases in the land-locked southeast African country. Three weeks later, with sixteen confirmed cases and two deaths recorded, Mutharika announced a twenty-one-day lockdown, starting on April 18. The new rules were to include shuttering central food markets and non-essential businesses, restricted hours for farming, and public transit only for hospital staff and emergencies. READ MORE.