A public health enhanced surveillance system for a mass gathering event.

Background: From June 7 to June 9, 2018, a G7 Summit was held in the Canadian province of Quebec. This international political mass gathering event posed a number of potential risks to public health.

Objective: To assess three additional monitoring strategies to detect public health threats during a mass gathering event.

Intervention: In addition to routine public health monitoring, a partnership was created and three monitoring strategies were put in place three days before, during and six days after the G7 event: the analysis of data on the presenting complaint and discharge diagnosis from 11 emergency departments in the area using the logical Early Aberration Reporting System; the daily polling of key health partners with an online questionnaire; and the analysis of calls to Info-Santé, a government-run telephone consultation service for the public regarding health and social issues.

Results: Emergency room data produced 78 alerts from the presenting complaints and 39 alerts from the discharge diagnoses. Of these 117 alerts, two were investigated (one in the respiratory and one in the neurological-muscular categories) and no other interventions were required. With a few exceptions, all of the health partners completed the online survey each day and no signal of concern was generated. Compared with historical data, no increase or differences in calls to Info-Santé were detected during the monitoring period.

Conclusion: The three additional monitoring strategies developed to detect events of public health importance during the 2018 G7 Summit in Quebec were successful in gathering timely data for analysis. Close collaboration and good participation from the different partners were essential to this project. However, because no public health event occurred, it was not possible to determine whether the enhanced surveillance system had sufficient speed and sensitivity for timely detection and response.