Northern Light
Superstar
Lots of good key points there.
Some looking at the current situation narrowly.
Others looking at the longer term. My thoughts, on his observations/recommendations in red
Surveillance. We need tracking systems, including the Influenza-Like Illness system, to find spread and monitor trends. Syndromic surveillance systems will need to be tuned to detect possible clusters, and signals investigated immediately.
Intrusive, but incredibly useful, allowing for fast, and therefore limited cost, containment.
Increase personal health resilience. Underlying conditions greatly increase the risk of severe illness. This isn't just bad for patients who get infected, it will take up scarce health care facilities. There has never been a better time to quit smoking, get your blood pressure under control, make sure that if you have diabetes it's well controlled, and -- yes -- get regular physical activity.
Incredibly important. Which is why, as a society we must tackle issues like this aggressively. We need to tackle obesity by outlawing drive-thrus, by outlawing fast-food combos that incentivize over consumption, we need to encourage
walking and cycling and make both easier, safer and more pleasant and penalize excess driving through higher gas prices, parking prices and tolls.
We need to make treatment for addiction readily available with low to no wait times, and free.
We need to crack the whip on drinking and driving.
We need to again look at portion sizes. Beef Bottles were 340ml or so, yet today people drink 473ml cans; wine bottles have stayed the same size, but the number of people living solo has skyrocketed, while single-sized portions of wine have not.
People can and should excercise portion control on their own, but the truth is its not that easy, and we a society should make it easier.
Massively scale up telemedicine. We need to reduce the number of people attending health care facilities while at the same time preserving and improving health.
Enormous virtue in this. Would help extend care to many in outer suburban and rural areas, as well as shut-ins and others who have difficulty accessing the medical system. Also saves money, and reduces the risk of hospital/clinic acquired infections!
Fix supply chain weaknesses. This is crucial for masks and other personal protective equipment, ventilators and supplies for ventilators, and laboratory materials. This is a good time to look at a core list of medications and ensure that the safest and most effective ones are available. For example, in another area where my group works globally, we've discovered that instead of 30 or 50 medications for high blood pressure, three would do for nearly all patients
That last bit highlights why pharmacare need not be as expensive as we are told. We don't need to cover 10,000 drugs or even the 4,000 Ontario currently covers for seniors to make essential medicines available to most people, most of the time.
As few as 150 drugs could achieve that.
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