Canada's efforts to 'flatten the curve' of COVID-19 could slow its spread in Canada

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Ottawa, Mar 11 (Canadian-Media): With unlikely chances of stopping the spread of coronavirus, due to the global number of its mounting to nearly 120,000 people in 115 countries,  public health officials have started considering its slow down by flattening the curve, a reference to an epidemiological graph of a disease outbreak, media reports said. 

Covid-19 Pandemic. Image credit: Twitter handle

A large spike on that graph indicates a sudden spike in people with infections can be catastrophic even for health-care systems in highly developed countries like Canada.

"If you can slow it down enough and flatten the curve, so the same number of people get infected, but over a much longer period of time, then ... what you're allowing is that the capacity will not be exceeded," said , a critical care physician at Winnipeg's Health Science Centre, CBC News reported. 

"And that protects the community, so that an ICU bed will be available when it's needed."

With most of Canada's hospitals already operating at 100 percent capacity and with the extra load from this year's bad flu season, Canada is ill prepared to care fore more patients in times of sickness.

Apart from supportive care, Canada also lacks vaccines or drugs to treat COVID-19. 

A survey of Canada's critical-care capacity after the 2009 H1N1 epidemic by a team of researchers under the leadership of Dr. Robert Fowler, a critical care physician at Toronto's Sunnybrook Hospital concluded that intensive care resources vary widely across Canada and may result in geographic differences in the ability to care for critically ill patients during increased demand. 

Health care professionals would be challenged to approach the management of COVID-19 on a national scale and being ready move equipment and health-care workers to where they are most urgently needed.​

Ontario, for example, had an extra 209 ventilators stockpiled and spread out across the province as of last August, according to one provincial document.  

Fowler said that more challenging would be the physical space within a hospital care for people than the availability of the number of ventilators.

Kumar's concern is about the number of qualified staff to cope with surge of patients

Italy's health-care workers are facing the grim reality of "triaging" under strained circumstances due to shortage of ventilators and ICU beds.

Although the concept of such triaging has been studied by Canada, but Fowler said so far Canada has failed to establish a system.