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To be blunt, in most other years infectious-disease experts aren’t the folks who are called on most frequently by the media.
“This is, for want of a better term, a pretty nerdy occupation yet, as it turns out, there’s a time and place where it’s good to have nerds around,” quipped Oughton.
This is Oughton’s third pandemic, which is why he says there’s a sense of déjà-vu. In 2009, he’d just recently started his job at the Jewish General when the H1N1 pandemic hit, and he was a medical resident in Toronto during the SARS pandemic in 2003.
“(SARS) was smaller on a global scale, but the experience I went through had a lot of similarities in terms of the need to protect health-care workers on the job and the effects on the city,” said Oughton.
