COVID-19

Institutional Strategic Initiatives

Institute for Pandemics

Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre

Institute of Health Policy Management and Evaluation

Centre for Addiction and Mental Health

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Mental Health

Research & Innovation

Women

Subheadline

“The current road towards pandemic recovery needs to consider these at-risk populations. If not, there could be dire long-term consequences for the current generation and ones to come”

Two new studies supported by the Institute for Pandemics – a ��Ƶ institutional strategic initiative – show that the non-pharmaceutical public health measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic were associated with increased mental health visits for mothers with young children, young women and adolescent girls.

As governments around the world imposed public health measures to reduce viral transmission, including stay-at-home orders, travel restrictions, and school closures, experts raised concerns about the potential lasting impact on the mental health of individuals, especially those belonging to vulnerable and at-risk populations.

In particular, mothers with young children faced obstacles related to parenting and caregiving, while young women and adolescent girls experienced major disruptions to school, social and daily routines.

The new studies – which built on previous research showing the COVID-19 pandemic had a larger impact on the mental health of men compared to women – aimed to examine how these pandemic-related non-pharmaceutical interventions have impacted the mental health of these groups.

“This work raises concerns about how to contain and address this issue,” says Geoffrey Anderson, a professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health’s Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation (IHPME) and lead of the pandemic recovery theme at the Institute for Pandemics.

“The current road towards pandemic recovery needs to consider these at-risk populations. If not, there could be dire long-term consequences for the current generation and ones to come.”

The research team also included: John Moin, a former post-doctoral researcher funded by the Institute for Pandemics; Shauna Brail, an associate professor at U of T Mississauga who directs the Institute for Management & Innovation; and Simone Vigod, head of the department of psychiatry at Women’s College Hospital and a professor in the department of psychiatry in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine.

Both studies compared rates of doctor visits for mental health care in the pre-pandemic period from March 2016 to March 2020 to rates during the pandemic from April 2020 to November 2021.

The first, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) Open, found a rapid increase in doctor visits by mothers of young children for mental health care during the pandemic compared to the pre-pandemic period, with most of the care for mood, anxiety, depressive disorders and alcohol and substance abuse.

In the second study, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) Open, the team found an increase in doctor visits for adolescent girls and women aged 14 to 24 for mental health care largely driven by care for mood, anxiety and depressive disorders. Additionally, there was an increase in hospital visits for eating disorders for adolescent girls and women aged 14 to 19. There was no increase in doctor visits or hospitalizations for boys or young men.

Both studies show that the implementation of public health measures during the pandemic was associated with increased usage of mental health services among mothers of young children, young women and adolescent girls, and point to potential lessons for future public health crises.

“Our research raises concerns about the mental health impacts of public health measures on vulnerable women,” says Anderson. “We need to address these impacts as key part of any effective and equitable pandemic recovery strategy and we need to pay more attention to these consequences in future public health crises”.

"We saw the rapid and ongoing application of non-pharmaceutical interventions as public health measures throughout the pandemic,” says Moin, who was the lead author of both studies. “We also now know that they were associated with abrupt and prolonged changes in the utilization of mental health services. This association should be considered for future public health planning and strategy.”

Renzo Calderon, another post-doctoral fellow funded by the Institute for Pandemics, is leading a team that is further exploring this observed trend.

Despite nearly four years having passed since the beginning of the restrictions, the pandemic continues to alter the landscape of mental health. Hence, the researchers’ focus is not solely on exploring the overarching trends but also on better understanding if there are specific socio-demographic groups of women who were particularly affected.

Preliminary results indicate that the demand for mental health services around specific issues such as eating disorders and substance abuse, especially among young women, has not yet diminished.

Such a targeted approach aims to uncover nuanced insights into how the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated these problems and lead to more effective interventions.

Breast milk may have protective effects against COVID-19: Researchers

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 18:38:03 +0000

Breast milk may have protective effects against COVID-19: Researchers

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 01/29/2024 - 13:38

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Samantha Ismail led a study by researchers at U of T and its partner hospitals that looked for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in human breast milk (supplied image)

Betty Zou

Topic

Emerging and Pandemic Infections Consortium

Institutional Strategic Initiatives

Sinai Health

Sunnybrook Health Sciences

Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology

Research & Innovation

Vaccines

Subheadline

“COVID-19 vaccination and infection result in antibodies in human milk that have neutralizing capacity"

The COVID-19 pandemic was an especially harrowing time for pregnant people and new parents.

The uncertainties about how the new coronavirus could affect a pregnant person and their developing fetus – not to mention being cut off from support networks – left many expecting parents feeling isolated and anxious.

“It was a very surreal time,” says Jenny Doyle, a Toronto mom who gave birth to her first child, Elliott, in 2020 and spent hours researching how the first vaccines made available the following year might affect her and her child. “At the time, vaccines for infants were still so far away. I remember hoping that some of the protection I’d received from my vaccine would pass through to Elliott.”

Now, new findings from a study led by researchers at the ��Ƶ and its partner hospitals suggest that is the case.

Published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the study looked for antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in breast milk from three different cohorts: individuals who contracted COVID-19 while pregnant or nursing, routine milk bank donors and individuals who received two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine while pregnant or nursing.

The researchers detected antibodies in breast milk from roughly half of the people in the COVID-19 positive cohort. That’s compared to less than 5 per cent of routine milk bank donors, who did not have any known exposures to COVID-19. In the vaccinated cohort, they found that antibodies levels were higher in people who had received the Moderna vaccine compared to those who had received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Unexpectedly, people who had shorter intervals between their first and second doses had higher antibody levels than those who waited longer between their immunizations.

“That finding definitely surprised me,” says Samantha Ismail, the study’s first author who completed her master’s degree in the lab of Deborah O’Connor, the Earle W. McHenry Professor and chair of Temerty Medicine’s department of nutritional sciences. “In [blood] serum, it’s the other way around where longer intervals between doses typically result in higher antibody levels, suggesting that something different is happening in this lactating population.”

In addition to Ismail and O’Connor, the study was led by Sharon Unger, medical director of the Roger Hixon Ontario Human Milk Bank at Sinai Health and a U of T professor of medicine and nutritional sciences, and Susan Poutanen, microbiologist and infectious disease consultant and Sinai Health and U of T associate professor of laboratory medicine and pathobiology.

The team took the study one step further by showing that some breast milk samples could prevent SARS-CoV-2 from infecting cells in a lab setting. Within the COVID-19 positive cohort, milk that contained antibodies against the virus were more likely to be neutralizing and immunization with the Moderna vaccine was associated with a stronger neutralizing capacity than the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

The researchers also found a small but significant number of breast milk samples that prevented SARS-CoV-2 infection despite having undetectable levels of antibodies, suggesting that there could be other components in human milk that are active against SARS-CoV-2.

While these findings provide strong evidence to support the potential protective effects of human milk, Ismail cautions that the study alone is not enough to prove that breast milk provides tangible protection against COVID-19.

“COVID-19 vaccination and infection result in antibodies in human milk that have neutralizing capacity, but we don’t know for sure how the neutralizing capacity seen in the lab translates to protection in infants,” says Ismail, who is now a second-year medical student at U of T.

She points out that previous studies have shown a clear protective effect of antibodies in human milk against other viruses like enterovirus and rotavirus. To date, such studies have not been done with COVID-19.

Even so, the findings provide reassuring news to parents like Doyle, who breastfed her son longer than she had intended to ensure that he was still getting breast milk when she received her second COVID-19 vaccine.

“Trying to figure out how to protect this tiny being in that scary and bleak time, I was grasping at every little piece of information and whatever little piece of hope we had.”

The study was supported by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research and was a collaboration between the department of microbiology at Sinai Health System/University Health Network, the Roger Hixon Ontario Human Milk Bank at Sinai Health System and the Toronto High Containment Facility, where the live SARS-CoV-2 neutralization studies were completed.

It involved contributions from several members of the Emerging and Pandemic Infections Consortium, a U of T institutional strategic initiative. In addition to O’Connor, Poutanen and Unger, they include Scott Gray-Owen, of Temerty Medicine’s department of molecular genetics, Samira Mubareka, of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and Temerty Medicine’s department of laboratory medicine and pathobiology, and Jennie Johnstone and Allison McGeer – both of Sinai Health and Temerty Medicine’s department of laboratory medicine and pathobiology.

Ontario sees 17 per cent decrease in access to youth sports: MLSE, U of T report

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 18:41:36 +0000

Ontario sees 17 per cent decrease in access to youth sports: MLSE, U of T report

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 01/26/2024 - 13:41

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Young people run on a basketball court at MLSE Launchpad, a 42,000 sqaure-foot facility for sport and development in downtown Toronto (photo courtesy of MLSE Launchpad)

Jelena Damjanovic

Topic

Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education

Sports

Youth

Subheadline

Annual Change the Game research report cited social isolation and affordability as biggest barriers to youth participation

A new report on the state of youth sports in Ontario found a 17 per cent decrease in access compared to the previous year across various demographic groups, with social isolation and affordability reported as the greatest barriers to participation.

The annual Change the Game research report, created through a partnership between MLSE Foundation and ��Ƶ researcher Simon Darnell, also cited gender, racial and household disparities as factors contributing to a lack of access to sports, with 38.5 per cent of six- to 10-year-olds reporting experiencing racism or discrimination in sports.

Overall, 36 per cent of Ontario youth reported not having access to safe places to play sports in 2023. When asked what would improve the quality of youth sports culture, the most frequent response was “an environment where I can make friends.”

“I was more disappointed than surprised by the results,” said Darnell, an associate professor in U of T’s Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education (KPE) and director of the Centre for Sport Policy Studies (CSPS). “We know that the COVID-19 pandemic forced some youth out of sport altogether and made sport increasingly inaccessible for others who tried to remain. And we knew that getting kids back to sport after they dropped out was going to be challenging.

“We also know that many elements or aspects of social life are increasingly inaccessible in our world today. So, what this points to is the importance of securing accessibility and inclusion as key values and policy priorities in youth sport provision.”

The Change the Game research project was conceived in 2021 as an anonymous online survey of Ontario youth about their experiences with access, engagement and equity issues in sport. The most recent study was the largest to date, with more than 10,000 survey responses – bringing the total number of youth voices collected over three years of research to 25,000.

This year, the project also collaborated with youth sport organizations, including U of T’s BIPOC Varsity Association, Toronto FC Academy, Argos Rowing Club and Ausome Ottawa, which suggested solutions to the barriers expressed by research participants in the first two years of the study.

Victor Adarquah, a PhD student in U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine, was the lead research assistant on the project, receiving valuable hands-on experience in applying research to address real-world issues.

“This project was an incredible opportunity to bridge my interest in community and social impact work with research,” said Adarquah. “I found it especially rewarding to experience the fast-paced nature and real-time application of the research findings. The work here doesn't just sit on a shelf, it's actively informing and shaping ongoing initiatives.”

Tanya Mruck, vice-president of community engagement and social impact at MLSE, said the data collected in the Change the Game research study will serve as an important resource that will help guide the investments and community engagement priorities of the MLSE Foundation. Study insights will also be available publicly through an online report, interactive data dashboard and open access dataset.

“What this project demonstrates is that sharing of resources and expertise through collaborations between universities and community or industry partners is both possible and beneficial,” said Darnell. “When we embarked on this collaborative project back in 2021, we wanted to better understand how youth in Ontario engage in sport in order to build a more equitable sport system for them. Along the way, it became the largest youth sports study of its kind in Canada – one which will provide sport and recreation providers, policymakers, funders and future researchers with valuable data and recommendations to change the game for the better.”

Why is COVID-19 more severe in some people? Researchers use genetics, data science to find out

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 14:08:53 +0000

Why is COVID-19 more severe in some people? Researchers use genetics, data science to find out

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 10/25/2023 - 10:08

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(Photo by Cole Burston/AFP/Getty Images)

Tyler Irving

Topic

Our Community

Institutional Strategic Initiatives

Data Sciences Institute

Princess Margaret Cancer Centre

Sinai Health

Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre

Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Unity Health

Computer Science

Faculty of Arts & Science

Hospital for Sick Children

Mount Sinai Hospital

Research & Innovation

St. Michael's Hospital

Statistical Sciences

University Health Network

Women's College Hospital

Subheadline

With the help of U of T's Data Sciences Institute, researchers from the university and partner hospitals gathered more than 11,000 full genome sequences from across Canada

Why do some people have a more severe course of COVID-19 disease than others? A genome sequence database created by an international collaboration of researchers, including many from the ��Ƶ and partner hospitals, may hold the answers to this question – and many more.

The origins of the Canadian COVID-19 Human Host Genome Sequencing Databank, known as CGEn HostSeq, can be traced to the earliest days of the pandemic.

Lisa Strug, senior scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and academic director of U of T’s Data Sciences Institute, one of several U of T institutional strategic initiatives, says genetic data was top of mind for her and other researchers in late 2019 and early 2020 as reports of a novel form of coronavirus emerged from China and then other locations across the globe.

Lisa Strug (Photo courtesy The Hospital for Sick Children)

“In my research, I use data science techniques to map the genes responsible for complex traits,” says Strug, who is a professor in U of T’s departments of statistical sciences and computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science and in the biostatistics division of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

“We knew that genes were a factor in the severity of previous SARS infections, so it made sense that COVID-19, which is caused by a closely related virus, would have a genetic component, too.

“Very early on, I started getting messages from several scientists who wanted to set up different studies that would help us find those genes.”

Over the next few months, Strug – who is also the associate director of SickKids’ Centre for Applied Genomics, one of three sites across Canada that form CGEn, Canada’s national platform for genome sequencing infrastructure for research – collaborated with nearly 100 researchers from across U of T and partner hospitals and institutions, as well as other researchers from across Canada to enrol individuals with COVID-19 and sequence their genomes.

Some of the key team members from the Toronto community included:

Stephen Scherer, chief of research at SickKids Research Institute and a University Professor in U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine, as well as director of the U of T McLaughlin Centre
Rayjean Hung, associate director of population health at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Sinai Health, and a professor in U of T’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health
Angela Cheung, clinician-scientist at University Health Network, senior scientist at Toronto General Hospital Research Institute and a professor in U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine
Upton Allen, head of the division of infectious diseases at SickKids and a professor in U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine

The projected was initiated by Scherer and CGEn’s Naveed Aziz, along with Strug, and a $20-million grant was secured from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, administered through Genome Canada.

“We had to go right to the top to get this project funded fast and our labs and teams worked seven days a week on the project right through the pandemic,” Scherer recalls.

Identifying associations between individual genes and complex traits typically requires thousands of genomes – both from those with the trait and those without. Though there was no shortage of cases to choose from, it was critical to gather and sequence DNA – and then organize the data in a way that would be ethical, efficient and useful to researchers now and in the future.

“One of our key mandates at the Data Sciences Institute is developing techniques and programs that ensure that data remains as open, accessible and as re-producible as it can be,” Strug says.

“That vision was brought to bear as we assembled the data infrastructure for this project – for example, ensuring that consent forms were as broad as possible so that this data could be linked with other sources, from electronic medical records to other health databases.

“We wanted to be sure that even after the COVID-19 pandemic was over this could be a national whole genome sequencing resource to ask all kinds of questions about health and our genes. The development of the database and its open nature also enabled Canada to collaborate effectively with similar projects in other countries.”

Partner hospitals and institutions:

The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids)
Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Sinai Health
Mount Sinai Hospital, Sinai Health
St Michael’s Hospital, Unity Health Toronto
University Health Network (UHN)
Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, UHN
Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
Women’s College Hospital
Toronto General Hospital, UHN
Baycrest Health Sciences

In the end, the project gathered more than 11,000 full genome sequences from across Canada, representing patients with a wide range of health outcomes. Those data were then combined with even more sequences from patients in other countries under what came to be called the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative.

It didn’t take long for patterns to start to emerge. A paper published in Nature in 2021 identified 13 genome-wide significant loci that are associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection or severe manifestations of COVID-19.

Since then, even more data have been added, and subsequent analysis has confirmed the significance of existing loci while also identifying new ones. The most recent update to the project, published in Nature earlier this year, brings the total number of distinct, genome-wide significant loci to 51.

“Identification of these loci can help one predict who might be more prone to a severe course of COVID-19 disease,” says Strug.

“When you identify a trait-associated locus, you can also unravel the mechanism by which this genetic region contributes to COVID-19 disease. This potentially identifies therapeutic targets and approaches that a future drug could be designed around.”

While it will take many more years to fully untangle the effects of the different loci that have been identified, Strug says that the database is already showing its worth in other ways.

“It can be difficult to find datasets with whole genome sequence and approved for linkage with other health information that are this large, and we want people to know that it is open and available for all kinds of research well beyond COVID through a completely independent data access committee,” she says.

“For example, several investigators from across Canada have been approved to use these data and we’ve even provided funding to trainees to encourage them to develop new data science methodologies or ask novel health questions using the CGen HostSeq data.”

“This was a humongous effort, where researchers from across Canada came together during the COVID-19 pandemic to recruit, obtain and sequence DNA from more than 11,000 Canadians in a systematic, co-operative, aligned way to create a made-in-Canada data resource that will hopefully be useful for years to come. I think that was really miraculous.”

Rebuilding public trust after COVID-19: U of T experts review law, ethics and policymaking

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 14:08:09 +0000

Rebuilding public trust after COVID-19: U of T experts review law, ethics and policymaking

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 10/13/2023 - 10:08

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Trudo Lemmens, a professor in U of T’s Faculty of Law, is co-leading a study about the impact of COVID-19 public health measures on disadvantaged communities (photo by Nina Haikara)

Topic

Disability rights, disability justice and disability advocacy have been an increasing focus of Trudo Lemmens’s research – particularly in the wake of COVID-19.

“The recent COVID-19 pandemic revealed again how various measures and policies often uniquely impact on persons with disabilities,” says Lemmens, a ��Ƶ Faculty of Law professor who holds the Scholl Chair in Health Law and Policy with cross-appointments to U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine, Dalla Lana School of Public Health and Joint Centre for Bioethics.

“The voices of disabled persons were largely ignored, and the disability community was not meaningfully involved in the decision-making process.”

Lemmens and co-principal investigator Alison Thompson, an associate professor and a bioethicist at U of T’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and Dalla Lana School of Public Health, as well as former members of the COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, are leading a global interdisciplinary study on “Rebuilding public trust after COVID-19: Examining public health measures and their impacts on disadvantaged communities.”

Their research, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s (SSHRC) New Frontiers in Research Fund for post-pandemic recovery, aims to shed light on the challenges faced by disadvantaged communities during the pandemic and provide insights to rebuild public trust and address health disparities.

“Viruses don’t discriminate, societies do,” says Thompson, who has worked on ethics and policymaking issues both nationally and internationally and was a member of the Ontario COVID-19 Bioethics Advisory Table.

“We need to listen to persons living with disabilities, for example, about how their concerns can be better addressed, and how policy processes can be made more inclusive and responsive to the needs of people who are disproportionately harmed because of pre-existing, unjust social conditions.”

Alison Thompson (supplied image)

Their post-pandemic recovery research is born in part out of earlier work by the project's team members, including Deborah Stienstra, a professor of political science and director of the Life Work Well Research Centre at the University of Guelph, and Kevin Bardosh, an applied medical anthropologist at the University of Washington. The work was also informed by policy discussions on clinical triage policies with the Ontario Human Rights Commission, ARCH Disability Rights Centre, and the AODA Alliance (Accessibility for Ontarians with Disability Alliance).

Stienstra’s report, “Consistently excluded: A disability inclusion analysis of Canada’s COVID-19 policies,” was featured during the Faculty of Law’s ongoing Health Law, Policy & Ethics Seminar Series, which was organized by Lemmens.

Another seminar featured the collaborative research paper – “The Unintended Consequences of COVID-19 Vaccine Policy: Why Mandates, Passports, and Segregated Lockdowns May Cause more Harm than Good” – written by Bardosh, Lemmens, and others involved in the new project. A recording of the discussion for "Unintended Consequences" has since received more than 77,000 YouTube views.

“Experts have been recommending development of pandemic policies for a long time – since SARS-CoV [severe acute respiratory syndrome] in Ontario – and still it appears we were unprepared and failed to have equitable policies in place,” Lemmens says.

He adds that other countries introduced different measures and policies during COVID-19 and that we can learn from various approaches. Fernando Aith, a visiting professor of health law at University of São Paulo, is part of the research team that will be exploring Brazil’s approaches.

“Brazil had one of the highest COVID-19 fatality rates in the world. Denialism, mistaken political and administrative decisions, lack of co-ordination between the different Brazilian federative entities, stand out among the problems faced throughout the pandemic, which killed more than 700,000 people in the country,” says Aith.

“A comparative study between Brazil-Canada will allow us to understand the similarities and differences of these countries in confronting the pandemic, and thus consolidate strategic knowledge to prevent future public health emergencies."

Lemmens says public health policy has traditionally emphasized the importance of building, strengthening, and maintaining public trust. To that end, researchers will explore how the implementation or absence of different measures, such as testing strategies, vaccine and mask mandates, clinical triage policies and public health communication have influenced public trust – particularly between already disadvantaged communities, health authorities and other institutions such as universities.

“Our research is built on this premise that trust is key to promote public health in the long-term and to ensure compliance with public health measures,” Lemmens says. “But during the pandemic, measures and policies – often of a rights-restrictive nature – were implemented or withdrawn without discussion with those particularly affected.”

He says it can be argued that the seriousness and urgency of the public health threat may have hindered elaborate consultation, but stresses that the need for inclusion in decision-making is a must.

“In our research, we want to explore what the impact is on how governments, health-care institutions and universities acted during the pandemic, and whether things could have been done differently, particularly from a disability justice perspective. We want to come up with more inclusive public health governance approaches,” he says.

“Could we design an advisory committee structure that involves more stakeholders from the disability community, racialized minorities, Indigenous Peoples and those living in poverty? How would such a different governance structure function during a pandemic?”

By examining the intersection of public health policies and societal factors, the project can help inform future policymaking and public health interventions.

“We shouldn’t too quickly turn the page and move on as if everything went well,” says Lemmens. “We need to learn from our experiences.”

U of T researchers contribute to Canada-wide COVID-19 immunity study

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 18:54:11 +0000

U of T researchers contribute to Canada-wide COVID-19 immunity study

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 08/14/2023 - 14:54

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(Juan Gaertner/Science Photo Library/Getty Images)

A new study involving researchers from the ��Ƶ suggests that, by last spring, 75 per cent of people across Canada had developed antibodies in response to COVID-19 infections.

Using aggregate data from various collaborating pan-Canadian teams, researchers found that few people showed SARS-CoV-2 infection in their blood during the country’s pre-vaccination and vaccine rollout phases – 0.3 per cent and 9 per cent, respectively.

By mid-June 2022, however, infection rates jumped to 47 per cent and increased to 75 per cent by March 2023 as the highly transmissible and immune-evasive Omicron variant spread across the country. Infection appears to be slowing, though it continues to rise among older adults.

The findings – published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) – used data from CanPath (the Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow’s Health), which is based at U of T’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

“We aimed to untangle the relationship between vaccination status – including the number of doses, brands, and time between doses – and infection risk while accounting for prior infection, adherence to recommendations from public health officials and other factors which impact immunity such as age,” says study investigator Kimberly Skead, who is national scientific co-ordinator for CanPath and recently defended her PhD in molecular genetics at U of T and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research.

Since 2020, CanPath, with other national partners, has been tasked by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) and the COVID-19 Immunity Task Force (CITF) to support a national COVID-19 serological surveillance study. In March 2020, with $5.2 million in funding, the CanPath team began collecting COVID-19 data from more than100,000 Canadians, including dried blood spots at three different time points: pre-vaccination (March 2020 to November 2020); vaccine rollout (December 2020 to November 2021); and the Omicron waves (December 2021 to March 2023).

Following the health of its 330,000 participants over the long term, CanPath is well-positioned among CITF collaborators to provide vital insights into the nature and duration of immune response and the need for and timing of vaccine booster doses.

“CanPath’s extensive participant base has been instrumental in enabling us to find these differences in exposure and immunity across Canada,” says study investigator Philip Awadalla, who is national scientific director for CanPath and a professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the department of molecular genetics in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine.

“The results from our studies, combined with the wealth of data and ongoing research from our collaborators, can contribute to different vaccine responses as the pandemic progresses.”

Certain measures can be taken to ensure that our ongoing narrative remains one of resilience, adaptability, and safeguarding our collective well-being, the researchers say.

“Given the lingering risks of post-COVID conditions and the vulnerability of certain individuals to severe outcomes, a proactive approach is essential,” says Victoria Kirsh, a study investigator who is a scientific associate at Ontario Health Study and an assistant professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

“To safeguard against future variants, it’s important to continue monitoring COVID-19’s spread and roll out booster campaigns ahead of upcoming waves.”

On-line toolbox shares ideas and adaptations from U of T community members

ksoobria — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 15:36:42 +0000

On-line toolbox shares ideas and adaptations from U of T community members ksoobria Mon, 08/14/2023 - 11:36

The events of the pandemic underlined the need for the university to consolidate and share knowledge regarding operations, and to continue to update and improve its processes. It was a time that brought into sharp focus U of T’s core mission of teaching and research. It also demonstrated the value of cross-functional teams working across campuses toward common goals, and the role of these teams in enabling an agile response to changing circumstances.

The University Resilience Project Team, initiated by Vice-President & Provost Cheryl Regehr in spring 2022, has completed its work in partnering with campuses and divisions to launch nine initiatives in response to feedback it collected from the community. One of these initiatives is an on-line toolbox, now part of the UTogether website. The toolbox is a source of examples and advice contributed by U of T staff and faculty developed in response to the pandemic.

“The goal of the toolbox is to inspire further thinking and problem-solving in the post-pandemic era,” said Professor Nick Rule, Vice-Principal (Academic) & Dean, U of T Mississauga and who led the RPT as Provostial Advisor on University Resilience.

“The RPT’s work illuminated the community’s need to discuss and acknowledge the significance of the pandemic. Compiling the innovative work of our faculty and staff through this resource is an important part of our path forward.”

The RPT was initiated by the Provost as a way for members of the university community to reflect on their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to consolidate and retain the knowledge gained during that period.

From April to September of 2022, RPT members conducted extensive consultations with the U of T community, focusing on the following key questions: lessons learned, identifying obstacles, things to change and innovations and practices to keep.

The RPT spoke with 300+ academic, administrative and student leaders from every division and campus in small sessions; received 224 responses in a web-based survey advertised to the entire U of T community; and gave 43 presentations to operational units, senior leadership and members of Governing Council.

Having heard from the community, the RPT worked in partnership with campuses and divisions to implement nine initiatives in response to the feedback received in their consultations. These initiatives fall into three categories: navigation, engagement and future proofing. The work of sustaining these initiatives is continuing in the hands of the RPT’s collaborative partners.

More details about the work on the RPT are available on the Provost’s website.

On-line toolbox shares ideas and adaptations from U of T community members

(photo by Watchara Piriyaputtanapun/Getty Images)

Communications Staff

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U of T researchers find vulnerability in COVID-19 variants that reduces transmissibility

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 20:45:36 +0000

U of T researchers find vulnerability in COVID-19 variants that reduces transmissibility

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 06/12/2023 - 16:45

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(illustration by NIAID)

Anika Hazra

Topic