As COVID-19 quietly incubated in Wuhan, China, last fall, public health officials in Canada were looking for gaps that needed to be closed in their long effort to upgrade this country’s online pandemic early warning system.
Few people outside of a tight circle of highly-specialized epidemiologists and federal bureaucrats had ever heard of the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) before the novel coronavirus became a global pandemic.
That’s probably going to change now.
Information about the coronavirus outbreak is spreading fast, but what do we actually know about the illness? CBC News medical contributor and family physician Dr. Peter Lin breaks down the facts about what it is, where it came from, how it spreads and what you can do to protect yourself. 5:10
The online, multilingual monitoring and analysis unit, which scours the Internet for media reports of infectious diseases, has been a crucial pandemic tripwire for both Canada and the World Health Organization (WHO).
The network delivered its first report about COVID-19 on Dec. 31, 2019 — one day after a similar online monitoring network known as ProMED issued its notification.
CBC News has obtained a series of internal public health agency documents and slide-presentation decks — including one given by a senior epidemiologist from the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) last November on the eve of a pandemic that has since killed tens of thousands and crippled the world economy.
Network needed a tech upgrade
The documents bring into sharper focus the kind of information key decision-makers had at their fingertips as the outbreak started in China and raise questions about how seriously global pandemic preparedness was being taken within the federal government.
The records show GPHIN was in the middle of a long-overdue technology upgrade as the virus was spreading.
Despite almost four years of work with the National Research Council of Canada, the early warning system was — as of last fall — still in need of “improvement in the geographical and time tagging algorithm,” according to a Nov 12, 2019 presentation to a WHO conference in Seoul, South Korea by senior epidemiologist Florence Tanguay.
That algorithm is crucial to the system’s ability to sort through as many as 7,000 online articles per day to spot disease outbreaks around the globe.
The network also was awaiting an “expansion to new data sources,” such as social media feeds. From its inception in the late 1990s, GPHIN had relied on news wire services and later local media articles posted online.
Network’s first alert came from a media report
At the time when GPHIN and ProMED issued their COVID-19 notices, little was known about how deadly or contagious the outbreak might be — but the early signs were ominous.
The International Society for Infectious Diseases, which runs ProMED, cited multiple urgent notices from official Chinese sources. One came from the Wuhan Municipal Health Committee, which warned that “multiple patients had been isolated” and medical institutions in China should be on the lookout for respiratory infections “and improve emergency plans for medical treatment.”
But the GHIN’s initial notice to its 800 subscribers, which include the WHO as well as the health ministries in Canada’s provinces and in 85 countries around the world, cited an Agence France-Presse report.
Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam speaks during a news conference in Ottawa April 15, 2020. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)
Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam said last week GPHIN was one of the intelligence sources she relied on, crediting it with detecting the outbreak in Wuhan “right at the end of December.”
It wrote daily reports on the progress of the virus, she said.
The Canadian government most likely would have been aware of the ProMED reports and has, according to senior health officials, also had personal contact with agencies in other countries, notably the U.S. Centres for Disease Control.
Earlier this month, the military’s health intelligence unit acknowledged it also had been writing regular briefings on the novel coronavirus since early January.
The medical intelligence cell within Canadian Forces Intelligence Command began producing detailed warnings about the emergence of the deadly novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China in early January, CBC News has learned. 2:09
‘Critical warning task’
Another major source of intelligence for the Canadian government, naturally, was the World Health Organization — although the documents show up to 20 per cent of that institution’s open-source intelligence comes from GPHIN.
It is difficult to understate the importance of the Canadian network, said one of the country’s leading intelligence experts.
“The Global Public Health Intelligence Network was meant to perform a critical warning task with regard to the COVID-19 … outbreak. This was its job,” said Wesley Wark, a University of Ottawa professor.
“It should have been at the heart of a Canadian and indeed a global early warning system.”
Created in 1997, GPHIN is credited with helping spot the SARS and H1N1 outbreaks.
Did world governments get GPHIN’s warnings?
During those previous outbreaks, the network issued rolling email alerts to those governments and the WHO as the viruses it was tracking appeared in new countries.
The documents obtained by CBC News raise questions about whether that practice of issuing specific alerts was followed in the case of COVID-19. The decision to issue those warnings would have been up to the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Wark said those warnings and alerts would have been crucial to other governments — and likely would have been taken more seriously than others because they’d be coming from GPHIN, a trusted source.
“It was the institution that was meant to have the technical tools, meant to have the expertise that governments and health experts around the world would look to as the most reliable source of open-source medical intelligence during an outbreak,” said Wark.
‘Dismaying reality’
But to date, he said, he’s seen no indication of how GPHIN daily reports were used, or if they even made their way into government risk assessments.
“The dismaying reality about the Canadian threat assessment of COVID-19 is — from the record we have available — it appears that for some reason or another, Health Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada, was not able to generate … consistent, daily reporting from its key sources of information, like the Global Public Health Intelligence Network,” said Wark, who pointed to the absence of the reports in documents tabled before the House of Commons health committee.
“The risk assessments referred to in some of the documents made available to the House committee suggest there were only periodic assessments that were done.”
The creator of the Global Public Health Intelligence Network says that, despite the network’s accomplishments in flagging SARS and H1N1 before they took off, successive Canadian governments have had to be convinced of the need to invest in a global disease early warning system in the age of globalization.
Money problems
“Governments, [in] Canada and elsewhere, do not invest in preparedness,” said Ron St. John, a former director general at the Public Health Agency of Canada who once served as the country’s quarantine officer.
“GPHIN, although it had proved itself, was never fully financed.”
Former Public Health Agency of Canada official Dr. Ron St. John speaking to the Pan American Heath Organization in Washington in 2014. (World Health Organization)
The network was conceived in 1997. Throughout St. John’s time in government, he said, GPHIN was on budgetary life support. He said the Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response routinely had to use a portion of its budget to keep the network “alive” because it never received enough federal money.
A spokesperson for the Public Health Agency of Canada insisted the network produced quality information for the health agency and the government as a whole.
“From the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, GPHIN was, and continues to be, an important source of public health intelligence for PHAC,” said Natalie Mohamed in an email.
Technological hurdles
Aside from funding, one of the recurring challenges faced by GPHIN has been the speed of technological change and the importance of keeping the network modern, said St. John.
In the presentation Tanguay gave to the WHO last fall, she told delegates the network had undergone a reboot in “collaboration with the National Research Council of Canada” (NRC) which led to the development of a “new, enhanced web-based platform using emerging technologies” powered by more automation.
She was referring to artificial intelligence systems.
Built on late-1990s technology that had been only partially refreshed, the aging network was by 2016 in need of a major overhaul.
The federal government had known for a long time about GPHIN’s antiquated system. A 2013 evaluation of epidemic intelligence systems red-flagged trouble that the Global Health Security Initiative had in sourcing information for an ongoing evaluation.
The GPHIN “system design did not allow the extraction or collection of data in a format compatible” with the security initiative analysis, the report read.
In a report posted online early this month, NRC suggested the project was a success.
Even so, the federal government recently put out a request for help from industry to address certain functional aspects of the GPHIN system, including search and location extraction.
In addition, the public health agency has formed a partnership with the University of Toronto’s Brain Alliance big data research centre to improve aspects of the network.
Mohamed said the renewal project is in its final stages and has met key objectives.
Netflix on Thursday reported that its subscriber growth slowed dramatically during the summer, a sign the huge gains from the video-streaming service’s crackdown on freeloading viewers is tapering off.
The 5.1 million subscribers that Netflix added during the July-September period represented a 42% decline from the total gained during the same time last year. Even so, the company’s revenue and profit rose at a faster pace than analysts had projected, according to FactSet Research.
Netflix ended September with 282.7 million worldwide subscribers — far more than any other streaming service.
The Los Gatos, California, company earned $2.36 billion, or $5.40 per share, a 41% increase from the same time last year. Revenue climbed 15% from a year ago to $9.82 billion. Netflix management predicted the company’s revenue will rise at the same 15% year-over-year pace during the October-December period, slightly than better than analysts have been expecting.
The strong financial performance in the past quarter coupled with the upbeat forecast eclipsed any worries about slowing subscriber growth. Netflix’s stock price surged nearly 4% in extended trading after the numbers came out, building upon a more than 40% increase in the company’s shares so far this year.
The past quarter’s subscriber gains were the lowest posted in any three-month period since the beginning of last year. That drop-off indicates Netflix is shifting to a new phase after reaping the benefits from a ban on the once-rampant practice of sharing account passwords that enabled an estimated 100 million people watch its popular service without paying for it.
The crackdown, triggered by a rare loss of subscribers coming out of the pandemic in 2022, helped Netflix add 57 million subscribers from June 2022 through this June — an average of more than 7 million per quarter, while many of its industry rivals have been struggling as households curbed their discretionary spending.
Netflix’s gains also were propelled by a low-priced version of its service that included commercials for the first time in its history. The company still is only getting a small fraction of its revenue from the 2-year-old advertising push, but Netflix is intensifying its focus on that segment of its business to help boost its profits.
In a letter to shareholder, Netflix reiterated previous cautionary notes about its expansion into advertising, though the low-priced option including commercials has become its fastest growing segment.
“We have much more work to do improving our offering for advertisers, which will be a priority over the next few years,” Netflix management wrote in the letter.
As part of its evolution, Netflix has been increasingly supplementing its lineup of scripted TV series and movies with live programming, such as a Labor Day spectacle featuring renowned glutton Joey Chestnut setting a world record for gorging on hot dogs in a showdown with his longtime nemesis Takeru Kobayashi.
Netflix will be trying to attract more viewer during the current quarter with a Nov. 15 fight pitting former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson against Jake Paul, a YouTube sensation turned boxer, and two National Football League games on Christmas Day.
REGINA – Saskatchewan’s provincial election is on Oct. 28. Here’s a look at some of the campaign promises made by the two major parties:
Saskatchewan Party
— Continue withholding federal carbon levy payments to Ottawa on natural gas until the end of 2025.
— Reduce personal income tax rates over four years; a family of four would save $3,400.
— Double the Active Families Benefit to $300 per child per year and the benefit for children with disabilities to $400 a year.
— Direct all school divisions to ban “biological boys” from girls’ change rooms in schools.
— Increase the First-Time Homebuyers Tax Credit to $15,000 from $10,000.
— Reintroduce the Home Renovation Tax Credit, allowing homeowners to claim up to $4,000 in renovation costs on their income taxes; seniors could claim up to $5,000.
— Extend coverage for insulin pumps and diabetes supplies to seniors and young adults
— Provide a 50 per cent refundable tax credit — up to $10,000 — to help cover the cost of a first fertility treatment.
— Hire 100 new municipal officers and 70 more officers with the Saskatchewan Marshals Service.
— Amend legislation to provide police with more authority to address intoxication, vandalism and disturbances on public property.
— Platform cost of $1.2 billion, with deficits in the first three years and a small surplus in 2027.
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NDP
— Pause the 15-cent-a-litre gas tax for six months, saving an average family about $350.
— Remove the provincial sales tax from children’s clothes and ready-to-eat grocery items like rotisserie chickens and granola bars.
— Pass legislation to limit how often and how much landlords can raise rent.
— Repeal the law that requires parental consent when children under 16 want to change their names or pronouns at school.
— Launch a provincewide school nutrition program.
— Build more schools and reduce classroom sizes.
— Hire 800 front-line health-care workers in areas most in need.
— Launch an accountability commission to investigate cost overruns for government projects.
— Scrap the marshals service.
— Hire 100 Mounties and expand detox services.
— Platform cost of $3.5 billion, with small deficits in the first three years and a small surplus in the fourth year.
—
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct .17, 2024.
VANCOUVER – More than a million British Columbians have already cast their provincial election ballots, smashing the advance voting record ahead of what weather forecasters say will be a rain-drenched election day in much of B.C., with snow also predicted for the north.
Elections BC said Thursday that 1,001,331 people had cast ballots in six days of advance voting, easily breaking a record set during the pandemic election four years ago.
More than 28 per cent of all registered electors have voted, potentially putting the province on track for a big final turnout on Saturday.
“It reflects what I believe, which is this election is critically important for the future of our province,” New Democrat Leader David Eby said Thursday at a news conference in Vancouver. “I understand why British Columbians are out in numbers. We haven’t seen questions like this on the ballot in a generation.”
He said voters are faced with the choice of supporting his party’s plans to improve affordability, public health care and education, while the B.C. Conservatives, led by John Rustad, are proposing to cut services and are fielding candidates who support conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic and espouse racist views.
Rustad held no public availabilities on Thursday.
Elections BC said the record advance vote tally includes about 223,000 people who voted on the final day of advance voting Wednesday, the last day of advance polls, shattering the one-day record set on Tuesday by more than 40,000 votes.
The previous record for advance voting in a B.C. election was set in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, when about 670,000 people voted early, representing about 19 per cent of registered voters.
Some ridings have now seen turnout of more than 35 per cent, including in NDP Leader David Eby’s Vancouver-Point Grey riding where 36.5 per cent of all electors have voted.
There has also been big turnout in some Vancouver Island ridings, including Oak Bay-Gordon Head, where 39 per cent of electors have voted, and Victoria-Beacon Hill, where Green Party Leader Sonia Furstenau is running, with 37.2 per cent.
Advance voter turnout in Rustad’s riding of Nechako Lakes was 30.5 per cent.
Total turnout in 2020 was 54 per cent, down from about 61 per cent in 2017.
Stewart Prest, a political science lecturer at the University of British Columbia, said many factors are at play in the advance voter turnout.
“If you have an early option, if you have an option where there are fewer crowds, fewer lineups that you have to deal with, then that’s going to be a much more desirable option,” said Prest.
“So, having the possibility of voting across multiple advanced voting days is something that more people are looking to as a way to avoid last-minute lineups or heavy weather.”
Voters along the south coast of British Columbia who have not cast their ballots yet will have to contend with heavy rain and high winds from an incoming atmospheric river weather system on election day.
Environment Canada said the weather system will bring prolonged heavy rain to Metro Vancouver, the Sunshine Coast, Fraser Valley, Howe Sound, Whistler and Vancouver Island starting Friday.
Eby said the forecast of an atmospheric weather storm on election day will become a “ballot question” for some voters who are concerned about the approaches the parties have towards addressing climate change.
But he said he is confident people will not let the storm deter them from voting.
“I know British Columbians are tough and they’re not going to let even an atmospheric river stop them from voting,” said Eby.
In northern B.C., heavy snow is in the forecast starting Friday and through to Saturday for areas along the Yukon boundary.
Elections BC said it will focus on ensuring it is prepared for bad weather, said Andrew Watson, senior director of communications.
“We’ve also been working with BC Hydro to make sure that they’re aware of all of our voting place locations so that they can respond quickly if there are any power outages,” he said.
Elections BC also has paper backups for all of its systems in case there is a power outage, forcing them to go through manual procedures, Watson said.
Prest said the dramatic downfall of the Official Opposition BC United Party just before the start of the campaign and voter frustration could also be contributing to the record size of the advance vote.
It’s too early to say if the province is experiencing a “renewed enthusiasm for voting,” he said.
“As a political scientist, I think it would be a good thing to see, but I’m not ready to conclude that’s what we are seeing just yet,” he said, adding, “this is one of the storylines to watch come Saturday.”
Overall turnout in B.C. elections has generally been dwindling compared with the 71.5 per cent turnout for the 1996 vote.
Adam Olsen, Green Party campaign chair, said the advance voting turnout indicates people are much more engaged in the campaign than they were in the weeks leading up to the start of the campaign in September.
“All we know so far is that people are excited to go out and vote early,” he said. “The real question will be does that voter turnout stay up throughout election night?”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.
Note to readers: This is a corrected story. An earlier version said more than 180,000 voters cast their votes on Wednesday.
