Officials still facing questions over the use of a COVID Database.
This after the Provincial Government agreed with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association to stop the disclosure of personal information to emergency personnel.
In the early stages of the pandemic, Police Chief Sylvie Hauth stresses they had shortage of personal protective equipment.
“When you have to choose to which call for service you triage the use of your PPE, we didn’t want to be put in that position. It was important for me to arm not only the police officers but also firefighters and EMS, who also had access to the database, so they knew what they were walking into,” says Hauth. “I think being realistic with what we were dealing with, not knowing at some point if exponentially our number of positive COVID cases would grow very quickly.”
Police Board chair Georjann Morriseau wanted to look into things further before weighing in.
The findings found Thunder Bay and Durham Region made up 40% of the 95,000 times the database was searched.
Thunder Bay, in particular, accessed the database over 14,800 times, a rate of access ten times higher than the provincial average.
