How 5 years of COVID-19 has prepared Toronto to face potential crises in the future – CBC

March 11 marked 5 years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic

Mar 14, 2025

Five years on, Toronto-area doctors and public health officials are looking back at what they’ve learned since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — and most agree the early experience will prove useful if the city faces another infectious disease crisis.

“The biggest thing was fear and uncertainty,” Dr. Justin Hall told CBC Toronto. Hall is chief of emergency medicine at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, where Canada’s first case of COVID-19 was identified on Jan. 25, 2020.

“Our staff responded extremely well to not knowing what was going to happen and every day looked a little bit different,” he said.

March 11 marked the fifth anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic. In the days that followed that announcement, the provincial government declared a state of emergency, with the City of Toronto following suit soon after.

Read more: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/covid19-five-years-1.7480814