Jessica Hopkins

Dr. Hopkins is a public health and preventive medicine physician with extensive local and provincial public health experience. She is the Chief Health Protection and Emergency Preparedness Officer at Public Health Ontario where she leads a multi-disciplinary team in synthesizing data and evidence to provide advice to decision-makers on public health and infection control programs and policies. Her experience with pandemics includes being on the frontlines of pandemic H1N1 in public health in Niagara region, leading the collaborative public health response to the opioid epidemics in Hamilton and then Peel, and now working with various government ministries, local public health units, health care partners, and academics to support Ontario’s COVID-19 response.

Dr. Hopkins is an Adjunct Lecturer with the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Assistant Professor (part-time) with the Department of Health Research Methods, Epidemiology, and Impact, McMaster University, former Associate Medical Officer of Health for Niagara region and Hamilton, former Medical Officer of Health for Peel region, and practicing family physician.

Pandemic Related Publications

The effect of seasonal respiratory virus transmission on syndromic surveillance for COVID-19 in Ontario, Canada https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(21)00151-1

S-Gene Target Failure as a Marker of Variant B.1.1.7 Among SARS-CoV-2 Isolates in the Greater Toronto Area, December 2020 to March 2021  DOI: 10.1001/jama.2021.5607 

Comparative analysis of policies and programs to support families and children during COVID-19  https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.04.21252943 

Impact of COVID-19 pre-test probability on positive predictive value of high cycle threshold SARS-CoV-2 real-time reverse transcription PCR test results DOI: 10.1017/ice.2021.369