Coronavirus (COVID-19) Collection
Stringency of containment and closures on the growth of SARS-CoV-2 in Canada prior to accelerated vaccine roll-out
Throughout 2020, non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) were the primary tools employed by governments and public health agencies to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2 (Ferguson et al. 2020, Koo et al., 2020). In Canada, as in many other countries, common NPIs included border closures, bans on non-essential travel, and mandatory physical distancing measures (McCoy et al, 2020). However, in contrast to many countries—particularly those in Europe—the authority and responsibility to implement these policies fall on provincial and territorial governments, meaning there is no formally coordinated response between them (Cameron-Blake et al., 2021).The role of case importation in explaining differences in early SARS-CoV-2 transmission dynamics in Canada—A mathematical modeling study of surveillance data
Both American and Canadian epidemics of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) are marked by stark geographic heterogeneities (Mishra et al., 2020). Despite reporting its first case on February 28, 2020—close to a month after Ontario on January 25th and British Columbia on January 28th—Quebec quickly became the epicenter of the Canadian COVID-19 epidemic. The disease’s mortality burden in that province, at 653 per million population, was 3.5 times as high as neighboring Ontario (186 per million) and 19 times that of British Columbia (at 35 per million) at the end of the first spring 2020 wave (Groupe de surveillance provinciale de la, 2020).
