According to documents obtained by CTV News that were circulated among health officials on Sunday and Monday, SARS infections have been spreading among "a religious group associated with the Centenary/funeral home case." The "Centenary funeral home case" refers to one of the original SARS infections in Toronto. A person infected with SARS was known to have visited a local funeral home, and people who had visited that funeral home were asked to be on the lookout for symptoms of SARS. Those cases were apparently misdiagnosed when they originally turned up in family medical practices and emergency rooms, rather than being screened through the SARS clinics that had been set up in the past 2 weeks. The misdiagnoses raise the possibility that the infections have spread further into the general population.
"Some of these cases were initially given a diagnosis other than SARS despite multiple visits to hospital emergency rooms," according to a Sunday memo by Dr. Sheela Basrur, Toronto's chief medical officer. "This was due to the apparent lack of a clear epidemiological link to a known SARS case."
This sort of incompetence is astounding to me. If these people were in waiting rooms and god know where else, Toronto could be a time bomb ticking.