Stay home. Flatten the curve. Stay two metres apart. Stick to your “social bubble.” Wear a mask. To reduce the spread of COVID-19, public health authorities have been instructing us to change our behaviours at a dizzying pace. As Canadians try to square the latest advice, university researchers and lecturers have been taking notes. Academics from public health to English to philosophy are looking at what’s being said, how it’s being said and – most importantly – how these messages are resonating.

Janet Lunn was on a waitlist for four years to see a neurologist in Halifax for pain that felt like “an immense amount of pressure” on her temple and behind her eye. The pain would wake her up in the night, often only allowing her a few hours of sleep. “I started developing anxiety about going to sleep because I knew the pain would hit,” Lunn says. While she waited for specialist care, she lost her job, and her long-term relationship ended – both events she attributes partly to her lack of sleep.

Since implementing a noise reduction program at her hospital five years ago, Soong is particularly attuned to the dips and peaks of hospital volume. She knows that the noise problem at hospitals is a serious one. More than just an annoyance for patients and staff, excessive noise can lead to lack of sleep, delirium, longer recovery times, and even addiction to tranquilizers. If a hospital’s mission is to improve the health of its patients, then noise is one of the biggest hurdles.

An Ontario Medical Association (OMA) analysis has found a 15.6% unexplained pay gap between female and male physicians. The analysis, based on billings from doctors to the Ontario Health Insurance Plan, accounted for years in practice, specialty, days worked, and other factors to make an “apples-to-apples” comparison.

St. Joseph’s Health Centre in Toronto is no longer blocking staff access to some abortion clinic websites, after CMAJ questioned the Catholic hospital about the practice as part of researching this article. CMAJ spoke to three physicians at St. Joseph’s who expressed concern that abortion clinic websites were blocked by an internal firewall.

Before the pandemic, Vancouver resident Sarah Hornstein didn’t like the idea of virtual health care. Newly diagnosed with asthma shortly before the shutdown, she worried that virtual care would be “more about efficiency” than quality. “It’s hard enough to get a doctor’s time,” Hornstein says. But after several virtual care visits, Hornstein says she was “surprised by how well it’s working.”

In late May, Amy Cohen, an organizer with Radical Action With Migrants in Agriculture, in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, received a WhatsApp message from a migrant farm worker in Ontario. He and another worker were in the bunkhouse, their living quarters on farm property, because they were too sick to work that day. His friend was vomiting, short of breath, and losing consciousness. Could she call an ambulance?

In early March, when Lauren Rowello’s 7-year-old got a fever and started coughing, COVID-19 briefly crossed her mind. Her spouse and 10-year old son had been coughing too, but they weren’t at all fatigued and had no other symptoms. She thought, “If this is COVID-19, then it’s not going to be that bad for me if I get it,” she recalls.

Edward Burtynsky (Photographic Arts, ’82) is world-renowned for his massive, incredibly detailed, and arresting vistas of places we wouldn’t otherwise see: the turquoise pools of lithium mines; oil pump jacks and rigs that stretch into the vast horizon; jagged slabs of a gargantuan marble quarry.

Doctors and health care leaders are worried about Canada’s growing backlog of urgent surgeries as non-emergency procedures have been dramatically scaled back or delayed due to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) for almost two months now.

For almost two months now, the primary public health message across Canada, and especially in Ontario, has been “stay home.” In cities, exercise outside is allowed, ideally in quiet areas at off-peak times, but not exactly encouraged. Guidance around outdoor exercise has principally been for adults. As the provincial chief medical officer of health, Dr. David Williams, put it, the rules shouldn’t stop “anyone from going out for their morning jog.” Children’s need for outdoor activity seems to have been neglected altogether.

Three weeks ago, Maria Isabel Gilbert felt so exhausted she needed to lie down on the couch. Over the next few hours, she developed a fever. The next few days brought a headache, dry throat, diarrhea, and chills. “I thought, ‘Oh boy, this is it,’” says Gilbert. This, of course, being COVID-19.

These are anxious days for most people, but especially for the health workers who are preparing for worse still to come as cases of COVID-19 multiply across Canada. Some health care workers are balancing long hours at work with coordinating childcare and supports for elderly parents. Other have chosen to isolate themselves to keep loved ones safe if they get sick, given dwindling supplies protective equipment.

The good news is that coronavirus doesn’t seem to be worse for pregnant women than for other adults, but there are some extra precautions that pregnant women should keep in mind.

Indigenous communities across Canada are adapting a new way of measuring child and youth wellbeing with a tool co-designed by Indigenous youth. Those behind the tool say Indigenous-developed health measures are desperately lacking, although vitally important as communities continue to contend with the mental health fallout of colonization.

Gabby Schoettle, a first-year medical student at Western University, was 8 years old when she lost her mother to breast cancer. In high school, when her father’s health started deteriorating, she took on the role of making meals for her younger brother and caring for her father. In her final year of high school, her father passed away. She and her brother had to work to pay the mortgage. “We had to learn a lot of things on the fly,” says Ms. Schoettle.

The coronavirus, or COVID-19, continues to spread, and has now infected more than 80,000 people worldwide. While most of those cases are in China, outbreaks have surfaced in South Korea, Italy and Iran. The World Health Organization has said to be prepared for a pandemic, and the Centers for Disease Control in the United States warned on Feb 25 that the outbreak could cause a “severe disruption” to the lives of ordinary Americans. In Canada, chief medical officer of health Teresa Tam said on Feb

At-home testing and monitoring of possible COVID-19 cases could ease pressure on hospitals and emergency services and prevent the spread of infection, say experts. Public health officials, hospital leaders and paramedics in the Champlain Local Health Integration Network in Ontario are working on a protocol to do just that. Under the proposed protocol, people suspected to have COVID-19 would be assessed, swabbed and monitored at home by specially trained paramedics in protective equipment.

In 1918, the Queen’s University senate voted to ban Black students from enrolling in its medical school. At the time, around 15 Black men were enrolled, representing one of the highest proportions of Black students of any medical school in the country, according to Edward Thomas, a cultural studies PhD candidate at Queen’s. While those students weren’t immediately forced out, they were strongly encouraged to leave by administrators. The ban emboldened racist sentiment on campus – white students

Ross Upshur decided to focus his research on the ethics of pandemic response when he was working in public health during the SARS outbreak of 2003. Currently the head of the division of clinical public health at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health and associate director of the Lunenfeld Tanenbaum Research Institute at Sinai Health, Dr. Upshur has published numerous papers on pandemic ethics. He’s also consulted with the World Health Organization, Doctors Without Border