Your Donations At Work
Your generous support of the COVID-19 Emergency Fund has helped the MUHC Foundation raise over $7 million to respond to this global health crisis. This transformative support is funding groundbreaking research to help us fight the COVID-19 pandemic and ensure optimal patient care. Additionally, generous gifts of PPE, meals, snacks and clothing are helping our hospital heroes on the front line continue their important work.
Your Donations Make All the Difference.
THE IMPACT OF YOUR GIFT
Made-in-Canada COVID-19 testing reagents
Widespread testing is one of the keys to controlling COVID-19. Knowing who has the virus and how it is being transmitted allows public health agencies to stop the disease and save lives. But at the beginning of the pandemic, the chemical reagents required to test for COVID-19 were scarce and produced internationally. With the help of start-up funds provided by your generous donation to the COVID-19 Emergency Fund, MI4 scientists Dr. Don van Meyel and Dr. Martin Schmeing are making COVID-19 tests in Montreal. In the summer of 2020, the team delivered its first batch of 15,000 tests to the MUHC clinical laboratories. This in itself is a triumph, but the impact goes even further: the project received a substantial government grant to create up to 30 million COVID-19 tests.
Hot Zone: the MUHC’s Level 3 Containment Lab
Working with live coronavirus is inherently risky, and can only be done in a federally designated level 3 containment lab (CL3). The MUHC is home to a CL3—colloquially referred to as a “hot zone”—which was created to allow work with tuberculosis. When the very first case of COVID-19 occurred, CL3 Director Dr. Marcel Behr immediately applied to work with live SARS-CoV-2 virus. Dr. Behr and the CL3 team are now providing research support to labs and companies across Montreal. Gifts to the COVID-19 Emergency Fund allowed Dr. Behr to shift the MUHC’s Hot Zone to study the coronavirus. Recently, this generous support leveraged a $1 million grant from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) to obtain new and specialized equipment to enable cutting-edge virologic studies.
CoVivre: Safeguarding Montreal’s most vulnerable
CoVivre is an outreach initiative led by Dr. Cécile Rousseau, Dr. Alexandra de Pokomandy and Dr. Sarah Gallagher that is helping vulnerable communities access health and support resources during the COVID-19 pandemic. The team is undertaking wide range of activities to help these communities navigate the pandemic safely. Since launching in the fall of 2020, CoVivre has partnered with the Centre des travailleurs et travailleuses immigrants to support workers in precarious situations exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and created a “back to school” guide for teachers to support them during the pandemic by offering mental health education.
Masks for our community
Your gifts to the COVID-19 Emergency Fund allowed the MUHC Foundation to provide reusable double-layer cloth masks to visitors to the MUHC adult site. Wearing these masks not only keeps our patients and hospital staff safe, but protects each recipient while they visit the hospital and when they are out in the community.
Connecting isolated COVID-19 patients to their families
Upon hospitalization, patients with COVID-19 are physically isolated. Only essential health care personnel interact with them, hidden behind masks and gloves and for restricted periods of time. This isolation, though essential to avoid spreading the disease, can lead to loneliness, depression, anxiety and fear. Thanks to support from the COVID-19 Emergency Fund, rheumatologist Dr. Inés Colmegna, internal medicine physician Dr. Amal Bessissow and computer scientist Dr. David Meger are studying whether video calls from patients to their loved ones can reduce negative emotions. So far, the researchers have found that though few of the seniors enrolled in their study have used a tablet before, many took to the technology quickly and were able to connect with their families, helping improve their mental health and well-being.
Shorter COVID-19 isolation
We all know that 14 days of self-isolation is mandatory following exposure to the coronavirus, and this is a big problem when front line health care workers come in close contact with infected patients. To avoid a shortage of essential medical staff, MI4 scientist Dr. Benjamin Smith is studying whether this isolation period could be shortened by as much as half. He is studying health care workers exposed to the coronavirus to find out. Each subject receives a COVID-19 test on days seven, nine, 10 and 14 after being exposed to determine how soon the virus can be detected. Preliminary results show that if the subject is going to develop COVID-19, the virus is usually detectable by day seven. Though further study is required to confirm this finding, it signals that, with the right testing strategy, isolation for health care workers may indeed be able to be reduced by half.
COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker
MI4 scientist Dr. Nicole Basta developed a public website that provides updates on COVID-19 vaccine development. The COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker (https://covid19.trackvaccines.org/) provides an interactive map of COVID-19 vaccine projects happening in countries all over the world. Colour coding provides a quick look at what phase of development each country is in, and clicking yields information on the number of trials, the affiliated partners and more. Made possible by your generous donations, the COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker is a fantastic way to communicate current and accurate information on COVID-19 vaccine development amidst many conflicting and inaccurate reports.
Combatting isolation for hospitalized patients
With COVID-19 running rampant through communities and hospitals alike, the MUHC has restricted visitor access to its hospitals. For hospitalized patients, this means to visitors, which can lead to boredom, depression and feelings of isolation. To help combat negative mental health, gifts to the COVID-19 Emergency Fund purchased Wi-Fi and television services for every one of the 341 patient rooms in the Royal Victoria Hospital during the first wave of the pandemic. While these services cannot replace an in-person visit, they enabled patients to connect with their loved ones via video calls and ward off boredom.