Where Are They Now: COVID-19 Response

Rui de Sousa ’88 provides us with this dispatch - COVID-19: Tales from the Other Side We shut down the Sunnybrook sleep lab in mid-March, as soon as the Ontario and Canadian governments started to declare emergency procedures. Sleep labs are at higher risk for spreading this virus because some of our tests involve aerosol generating procedures, namely the Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) and Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure (BiPAP) tests. Since then, we have gone to a skeleton crew, while still seeing some patients, new and old, via telemedicine. Like everything new, there is always a learning curve, and not all patients are familiar or comfortable with computers, much less with video conferencing. But we do our best to work through these technical challenges and manage our patients. All hospitals in Ontario are limiting the number of visitors during the COVID-19 pandemic to help keep patients and sta safe. ere just aren’t as many patients here physically as before the outbreak. Some sta are being re-deployed throughout the hospital, to support the true frontline heroes of this pandemic. We are stang dierent posts, screening at hospital entrances, limiting visitors, and providing directions to the sick and injured. We are also transporting some patients to dierent parts of the hospital. We are distributing surgical masks (the non-N95 masks) to all sta at various distribution posts throughout the hospital. Some are also supporting non-COVID-19 patients with their daily care. All of these eorts are to help free up and support sta working directly with COVID-19. Early on, as with many healthcare organizations, Sunnybrook adopted a position of ‘hope for the best, but prepare for the worst’. We moved quickly to postpone most elective procedures and moved non-critical patients, with the goal of maximizing the institutional reserve capacity. We began receiving daily (sometimes hourly) updates on general preparedness. Personal protective equipment (PPE), especially the N95 masks and visors/face shields, were inventoried and allocated to areas that expected high use, and refresher training was quickly implemented. e hospital also put forth a questionnaire to query all sta on additional skills that may be needed to ght this virus, in a worst-case, all-handson-deck scenario. Having years of experience with CPAP and its more sophisticated cousin, the BiPAP, I signed up to help on the COVID-19 wards if and when needed. We are using these devices in cases when a ventilator may not be yet required, but some kind

Photo credit: Doug Nicholson, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre

of respiratory support is clearly needed. But this pandemic isn’t just about physical health; it also takes a toll on mental and emotional health. e stress of commuting to the hospital every day, on public transit, mingling with strangers and surfaces that increase your chance of bringing this threat home, can be overwhelming. Many of us in healthcare, including some of my colleagues and friends, have moved out of our homes and into garages, spare rooms, or second homes. We now spend weeks away from our loved ones, spouses, children, friends, and family. If we have to go home, it is oen with a mask on our face and with minimal physical contact. I have seen friends break down because their usual social supports have been eroded. Social distancing at work, with the very people that could have given us the most support, slowly chips away at all of us. We go ‘home’ to an empty building… and those are the lucky ones. Insomnia is common. Fear is ever present, especially in the quiet evenings spent alone. Fear of the unknown (for much is unknown), but also fear of the known (for what we do know about COVID-19 is truly scary). No, it isn’t all doom and gloom, but when you are in the trenches, all you see is mud.

And yet there is hope. And there are triumphs. In the midst of all the heartbreak, we are united, as a world community, in unprecedented ways. Many of the greatest medical and scientic minds are all focused on a treatment or vaccine. Some of the most sophisticated healthcare and pharmacological companies ever assembled are working toward the same goal. Manufacturing companies, unrelated to medicine, have retooled to lend support and equipment in this ght. So many individuals have contributed, either through sewing one mask at a time, or donating lunches to overworked doctors, nurses, and other frontline sta… right down to you.

You. It may sometimes feel like you are simply siing at home and ‘doing nothing’, but trust me, you are doing much more than you could ever believe. You are making a huge impact by staying at home. You are contributing to this ght by taking away the ammunition this virus needs.

So, the take-home lesson is: please take care and stay safe. Keep this virus at a minimum in the wild. Keep the numbers of sick well below our current capacity. And when this is all over, just give me three or four days straight to catch up on some sleep.

God bless,

Using their Insig Health soware platform, David Del Balso ’13 and Mahew Mazzuca ’12 used their virtual clinic, Tia Health, which has over 150 doctors across Canada. Tia Health oers the ability for video chat, phone consultations, and secure messaging supported with an online portal featuring an electronic triage form, digital booking, reminders, charting, and more. With the COVID-19 pandemic taxing the country’s medical system, many doctors and medical professionals are forced to look for alternate ways to oer patient support. Certain provinces later opened medical coverage to include telehealth and virtual care. eir growth helped them secure a strategic partnership with WELL Health along with a $6 million investment. e deal will allow Insig the ability to scale its technology rapidly across Canada.

Mahew Lombardi ’06 co-founded GroceryHero, a technology platform hosted at getgroceryhero.com that matches front line medical workers with a volunteer grocery shopper in their neighbourhood via algorithmic postal code matching. e idea for the not-for-prot came about when Mahew found out from a friend, an ER doctor on the frontlines of the bale against COVID-19, that grocery delivery services were badly oversubscribed and medical workers were avoiding going inside grocery stores for fear of exposing the public. In its rst week, GroceryHero was promoted by the deputy prime minister of Canada, Ontario’s minister of health, and the mayors of Toronto and Oawa. As of April 5, it had more than 2500 signups and had made more than 300 matches of frontline medical workers with a volunteer shopper in neighbourhoods across the country. Andrew Morei ’04, President of RFP Design Group Inc., a Mississaugabased company that designs, manufactures, and installs custom furniture and furnishings, transformed their 50,000 square-foot production facility into one that makes protective face masks. Morei and his team were trained on how to sew and within a few short days, RFP Design Group Inc. became Canada Mask Supply, producing 10,000 masks per day in its initial runs. e masks are made for essential service workers, consumers, and various industries outside of health care. Canada Mask Supply has more than 40 signed contracts with companies around the world, with enough material in stock to produce more than two million masks.

Julian De Santi ’03 and

spent April 25 grocery shopping and delivering more than 1000 lbs. of food to the Daily Bread Food Bank with money raised from their colleagues at Veritas Investment Research. Special thanks go to Joseph Primucci ’03, who provided his company van to deliver the food.

Phil Gerretsen ’94 works at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Heath and Toronto General Hospital, primarily as a geriatric psychiatrist for hospitalized patients with dementia and other severe mental illnesses, such as mood and anxiety disorders and schizophrenia. “As health professionals, we have to protect these patients from the COVID-19 virus because they are at the highest risk of becoming critically ill or dying because of their age and underlying medical illnesses,” says Gerretsen.

John Sinopoli ’94 was behind a new coalition of some of Toronto’s top restaurants that banded together to lobby all levels of government for immediate help to stave o an economic disaster of the highest proportion brought about by COVID-19. Some of the restaurants that signed on with the group under the banner SaveHospitality.ca include Oliver Bonacini Hospitality, Oyster Boy, City Bey, La Palma, and Constantine

Flavio Volpe ’94, in his role as president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, was key to facilitating the retooling of automotive parts factories to make vital healthcare equipment. e discussions were underway even before automakers on both sides of the Atlantic began shuing down factories in response to the rapidly escalating COVID-19 crisis. e key challenge was establishing agreements with medical companies that allowed devices to be produced at a much larger scale amid a surge in global demand.

“If this was a Canada-only crisis, we could solve it in short order. But we’re calling the same companies as the U.S. and Germany. e stu we need has never been in this kind of demand,” said Volpe, who criss-crossed the province to help rms retool to build vital gear. “ere are a lot of skills in our industry and a lot of willingness to help. We can make most of these things here, and where we can help, we absolutely will.”

“Canadian companies need to keep building our own capacity. We need to look aer ourselves. We need to be self-sucient,” said Premier Doug Ford on an April 7 visit to the Woodbridge Group’s manufacturing facility in Vaughan, where he received the rst batch of personal protective equipment produced in Ontario. “Woodbridge, together with the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, has been working at an unprecedented pace to retool their factories and get the required approvals to manufacture masks for our frontline workers.”

“I was thrilled to see rsthand the fruition of their hard work and look forward to them ramping up production to meet the demands of Ontario and other parts of the country,” the premier said. “As the world faces a global shortage of medical equipment, Ontario-based companies have stepped up in a big way in order to ensure our frontline workers are protected against COVID-19. eir hard work is a true testament to what Ontarians are capable of when we band together.” Romeo Milano ’80, principal at Safetech Environmental, reports that his company was deemed to provide an essential service under the Government of Ontario's recent denition. Along with assisting insurance companies and restoration contractors on oods and building res, Safetech is currently involved in some projects where there have been conrmed outbreaks of COVID-19 in long-term care facilities.

Romeo commends the men and women of Safetech who are out there participating in this site work and stresses that the company’s people are highly trained and perform appropriate protective measures and personal hygiene. Technicians oversee the cleaning and disinfecting of buildings (performed by contractors) and perform thorough visual inspections and surface testing to ensure that these sites are safe for occupation.