Several scientists say the publicly-available COVID-19 data from Canada’s public health agency is “incomplete” and hurts their ability to build accurate pandemic models and forecasts that can help inform decision-makers.
They argue they need better data “urgently” and Canada as a whole needs a more robust and standardized system for data collection and sharing between the provinces and the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC).
“It’s not about whether I get to write a paper with a model in it,” said Caroline Colijn, an infectious disease modeller and mathematics professor at Simon Fraser University.
“It’s about whether we can answer the key questions we need to be able to answer nationally about how do we relax distancing? How do we monitor so we know what’s going on if we did start to relax distancing measures? How can we safely restart our economy?”
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2:14Coronavirus outbreak: Canada now stands at 29,826 confirmed COVID-19 cases, 1,048 deaths
Coronavirus outbreak: Canada now stands at 29,826 confirmed COVID-19 cases, 1,048 deaths
Colijn and Amir Attaran,
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