Canada’s official “Pandemic Influenza Plan” is 550 pages long, including glossary and acknowledgements. The few devoted readers who make it to page 371—“Guidelines for the Management of Mass Fatalities”—will encounter a brief but blunt discussion about this nightmare scenario: if every funeral parlour in town is filled to capacity, what happens to the overflow of flu-infected corpses?
The local hockey arena (as long as it’s chillier than eight degrees Celsius) could double as a makeshift morgue, the report says. So could a curling rink. But of all the possible storage solutions, the federal government’s pandemic playbook endorses one option above all others. “Refrigerated trucks can generally hold 25-30 bodies without additional shelving,” the document declares. “To increase storage capacity, temporary wooden shelves can be constructed of sufficient strength to hold the bodies. Shelves should be constructed in such a way that allows for safe movement and removal of bodies (i.e. storage of bodies above waist height is not recommended).”
The “temporary morgues” write-up includes one other helpful suggestion: “To reduce any liability for business losses, municipalities should avoid using trucks with markings of a supermarket chain or other companies, as the use of such trucks for the storage of corpses may result in negative implications for businesses.” In other words, even the worst pandemic will eventually pass—but a Loblaws rig rammed with body bags is the sort of image that never quite goes away.
Two months after surfacing in Mexico, the world’s newest strain of swine flu is showing no signs of going away, either. At last count, the never-before-seen virus (officially known as Influenza A/H1N1) has killed 31 people and infected 1,500 others in 21 different countries—including 142 people in Canada. The global case count is climbing so rapidly that by the time you read this sentence, those figures will have doubled, if not tripled. Most infectious disease experts now predict that it’s only a matter of days before the World Health Organization concedes the obvious and declares a full-blown, “Phase Six” pandemic.
The Canadian government—to its credit—is prepared for the absolute worst. When senior health officials assure us that they have been anticipating this moment “for years,” they are not exaggerating. Our country’s pandemic road map—all 550 pages—is an exhaustive, methodical collection of what-ifs and what-to-dos that tries to imagine every conceivable scenario and answer every possible question. No detail, no matter how minute or how morbid, is left to chance.
Should people wear surgical masks in public? (No. They are “of limited effectiveness and may provide a false sense of security.”) Should hospital volunteers be asked to provide a criminal records check? (Yes. And they should register with the provincial workers’ compensation board, just in case they twist an ankle—or fall victim to “accidental dismemberment.”) Should schools and daycare centres be closed? (Perhaps. But remember, “alternate arrangements will need to be made for child care, which may lead to ‘gatherings’ of children outside of the school setting thus contradicting the intended benefit of the school closure.”) What about other types of indoor gatherings? Should theatres and subway trains be shut down? (Not recommended. “This type of measure may be feasible but compliance and sustainability might be difficult, especially because effectiveness is unproven. This is particularly true for gatherings and activities that are considered ‘essential’ and would cause significant societal disruption should they be discontinued.”)
And what if there aren’t enough temperature-controlled trucks for all those corpses? “Mass burials or mass cremations,” the report says, “would only be considered in the most extreme circumstances.”
Thankfully, we’re not there yet. Not even close. In fact, as ominous as it sounds—Phase Six Pandemic!—the term itself is more about geography than severity. The WHO designation simply confirms that there is sustained human-to-human transmission in two regions of the world (North America and Asia, for example). It doesn’t mean that millions of people will inevitably perish, as in 1918. Scientists are not even sure if this latest strain is any more potent than your everyday flu.
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