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Since December 2019, there has been a global explosion of research on COVID-19. In Canada, the six National Collaborating Centres (NCCs) for Public Health form one of the central pillars supporting evidence-informed decision making by gathering, synthesizing and translating emerging findings. Funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada and located across Canada, the six NCCs promote and support the use of scientific research and other knowledges to strengthen public health practice, programs and policies. This paper offers an overview of the NCCs as an example of public health knowledge mobilization in Canada and showcases the NCCs' contribution to the COVID-19 response while reflecting on the numerous challenges encountered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In late January 2020, the first COVID-19 case was reported in Canada. By March 5, 2020, community spread of the virus was identified and by May 26, 2020, close to 86,000 patients had COVID-19 and 6,566 had died. As COVID-19 cases increased, provincial and territorial governments announced states of public health emergency between March 13 and 20, 2020. This paper examines Canada's public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic during the first four months (January to May 2020) by overviewing the actions undertaken by the federal (national) and regional (provincial/territorial) governments. Canada's jurisdictional public health structures, public health responses, technological and research endeavours, and public opinion on the pandemic measures are described. As the pandemic unravelled, the federal and provincial/territorial governments unrolled a series of stringent public health interventions and restrictions, including physical distancing and gathering size restrictions; closures of borders, schools, and non-essential businesses and services; cancellations of non-essential medical services; and limitations on visitors in hospital and long-term care facilities. In late May 2020, there was a gradual decrease in the daily numbers of new COVID-19 cases seen across most jurisdictions, which has led the provinces and territories to prepare phased re-opening. Overall, the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada and the substantial amount of formative health and policy-related data being created provide an insight on how to improve responses and better prepare for future health emergencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SARS-CoV-2 is the novel coronavirus that is responsible for the current pandemic of COVID-19 that was first recognized as a cluster of severe pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. In this review of the Canadian response to the pandemic, we will discuss the successes, weaknesses, and challenges in the approach to the management of COVID-19 to date. We will look at what we have done and what we should do now, highlighting successes of the laboratory, public health and infection prevention and control responses, particularly in hospitals and the community, while noting the failure to contain infections, and the resultant deaths in long-term care and retirement homes. We are advocating for the routine inclusion of more meaningful statistics on COVID-19 infections that reflect not just cumulative case numbers, but link those to severity of disease, hospital preparedness, and frequency of disease in the population. In addition, we highlight the need for stronger evidence-based decision-making regarding issues such as mandatory public masking, school attendance, and the unintended health and economic consequences of a possible future shutdown. Canadians would benefit from a more accurate reporting of the extremely low risk of adverse consequences of COVID-19 to young children, adolescents, and healthy adults under 60 years of age, rather than continuing apocalyptic predictions. Finally, we believe that Canada would benefit greatly by more closely considering the experiences around the world, which could guide local decisions, and would serve to the reduce the fear and uncertainty while also reducing unnecessarily severe restrictions on work, school attendance, social gatherings and travel, at a time when disease activity is not overloading hospital capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]