In early 2020, as Dr. Samira Mubareka was following global updates on a strange new virus first reported in China, people with pneumonia-like symptoms started showing up in her hospital in Toronto.
One of the patients that came to Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre was a man who’d travelled back from Wuhan. He was quite sick — more so than others who’d proven to be false alarms, Mubareka thought.
Inside Sunnybrook — a stately, sprawling hospital campus in one of Toronto’s toniest neighbourhoods — a newly developed diagnostic test confirmed what she and others suspected: the man had Canada’s first official case of what’s