The Impact of COVID-19 on Calls made to Canadian Poison Centres Regarding Cleaning Products and Disinfectants: A Population Based Retrospective Interrupted Time-Series Study One Year before and after the WHO's Pandemic Declaration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Health Canada is responsible for the assessment and management of health risks to Canadians associated with exposure to chemicals in the environment. Health Canada previously reported on a rise in calls made to Canadian poison centres for medical treatment advice/guidance on exposures to cleaning products and disinfectants at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This follow-up paper, examines whether reporting of these products remain elevated or have subsided to pre-pandemic levels, one year after the World Health Organization (WHO)’s declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic. Using Canadian poison centre data between March 2019 and March 2021 regarding hand sanitisers, disinfectants, bleaches, chlorine gas, and chloramine gas, this paper examined the changes before and after March 2020. In this time period, a total of 396,041 exposure calls were made to the five Canadian poison centres, of which 5,669 (1.4%) were for hand sanitisers, 3375 (0.9%) for disinfectants, 7022 (1.8%) for bleaches, 2205 (0.6%) for chlorine gas, and 369 (0.1%) for chloramine gas exposures. Those most often exposed to hand sanitisers were 19 years of age or less, whereas those older than 19 years of age were more often exposed to bleaches, chlorine and chloramine gas. Results show that one year after the WHO declaration of a pandemic, hand sanitisers, chlorine gas, and chloramine gas have yet to return to pre-pandemic rates, showing increases of 169%, 35%, and 108% from pre-pandemic rates, respectfully. Health Canada continues to monitor reported cases of hand sanitisers, disinfectants, bleaches, chlorine gas, and chloramine gas exposures through ongoing surveillance activities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".