The great PPE panic: how the pandemic caught Canada with its stockpiles down | CBC News

This is the fourth in a series of articles looking at some of the lessons learned from the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic and how Canada moves forward.

The federal government, she said, has conducted just under a hundred flights to Canada carrying Chinese personal protective equipment (PPE) and bringing supplies from the U.S.

In fact, Canada still doesn't have the PPE it needs to keep those essential workers safe.

Canada's pandemic response got off to a rocky start when it came to the basic tools: masks, gowns, gloves and other products.

The Trudeau government was widely criticized for sending 16 tons of PPE to China at a time when the novel coronavirus was still mostly a Chinese problem, and the Public Health Agency of Canada was still mistakenly assessing the risk to Canadians as "low.".

It's a lesson nearly everyone involved in fighting the pandemic agrees has to be learned — if Canada wants to avoid the same experience when the next pandemic hits.

Its history of Soviet invasion left it with a siege mentality that manifested itself in the construction of a secret network of bunkers stocked with supplies to carry its people through times of war or disaster — including a huge stockpile of masks.

Canada also has a National Emergency Stockpile System (NESS), launched in 1952 at the height of the Cold War and originally intended to help Canada survive a nuclear attack.

Lately, the system's rationale has changed somewhat. "We began to move away from beds and blankets and increased our holdings of antiviral medications and key treatments," Sally Thornton of the Public Health Agency of Canada told MPs at a committee hearing in May.

"The stockpile system proved completely unready for COVID-19, and the degree of unreadiness goes well beyond the explanation that COVID-19 was was unexpected in terms of its impact and scale," said Wesley Wark of the University of Ottawa, an intelligence expert who studied the NESS's response to the pandemic.

What Hajdu said is true — although her own government closed warehouses and left the stockpile even smaller than it found it.

"There was really no planning done to integrate the federal government's stockpile system with those held by the provinces and territories.

It's not until February — a month into the COVID-19 crisis — [that] the federal government wakes up to the fact that they don't even know what is held in provincial and territorial stockpiles, nor do provinces and territories know what's held in the federal stockpile.

When March arrived, Wark said, "the stockpile system had to transition into being a kind of portal for trying to get supplies hastily mobilized from domestic suppliers or international sources into Canada and passed on to provinces and territories.

A pandemic is a bad time to start shopping for emergency supplies. With COVID-19 engulfing one country after another, Canada found itself competing with dozens of other countries, as well as private U.S.

Anand said the government has learned that lesson and will ensure that stockpiles of PPE, medicines and other essentials are maintained in future.

Stockpiles alone won't solve the problem, she said, because PPE products have expiry dates and a major pandemic would at least start to exhaust any stockpile.

"We are even being told we can't wear our own masks and will be reprimanded and potentially disciplined for doing so.".

Calgary ER physician Joe Vipond told CBC News the government's position on masks struck him as irrational from the beginning.

"And I see that changing, but boy it's slow!" he said.

on March 25 every single hospital and every single long term care facility were mandated to wear masks in all situations, in order to avoid pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic spread," he said.

Villeneuve said the fact that rules on PPE use varied from place to place led nurses to suspect PPE policies were being driven not by the best science but by harsh realities of supply and shortage

Anand said that it's up to provinces to set such policies — but she doesn't rule out the federal government making uniform recommendations.