I was a chaplain at the Scarborough Grace Hospital, when it was the epicentre of the SARS outbreak in Canada. I was also a member of the Board of Directors, and so had a unique view of the impact of SARS – not just on the provision of medical (and pastoral) care, but also on the impact SARS had on the hospital and our health care system. I believe in many ways our experience with SARS helped to prepare for the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic… and while there are things we can be doing better, there are a lot of things that we could be doing worse, were it not for our SARS experience.
But this pandemering is not about how we respond to covid-19. The media is full (some may say perhaps too full) of heads ready to talk on that topic. Today’s topic-de-jour seemed to be on the role of humidity on viral infection transmission rates. Perhaps all those years of teaching psychrometrics (the thermodynamic properties of moist air) paid off for some of my students.
I just want to share that during SARS there were many, many unsung heroes. And because my business career was in buildings … their design, operations, and maintenance …. let me share the story of some of our Hospital Operations and Maintenance staff, who in the midst of the initial stages of the SARS outbreak – when little was known about its genesis, and less known about its severity and modes of transmission – we needed to convert rooms in the emergency and other areas of the hospital to operate on 100% outside air and negative pressure …. so that any viral or bacterial infection present in the patient in the room would be exhausted and not able to infect others. While doing these conversions, others on the team were ensuring the various air sterilization technologies in the hospital HVAC systems were fully operational.
Clad in breathing and isolation equipment and masks, these brave souls crawled through ducts and ceilings, rerouting connections and refitting controls in the midst of a dynamic and operating hospital, doing their work so that the rooms and areas that the doctors and nurses and other medical staff worked, and our patients stayed, would be safer.
These staff quietly and efficiently worked – hidden from sight – to make a safer environment for all those in the hospital. And not just at our hospital …. this story was repeated again and again at hospitals across Canada.
So, to those who took on great personal risk to make our hospitals safe, back then, and especially now …. thank you. To those who kept and still keep the rooms and halls clean and disinfected …. thank you. To those who kept and keep the HVAC systems running, the water clean and medical gasses available ….. thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
You are my heroes.