Chris Selley: If Trudeau wants to help our COVID response, here's something better than empty boasting

 

A student from the University of Glasgow administers a self test for COVID-19 at a pop-up testing centre on September 24, 2020. PHOTO BY ANDY BUCHANAN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Health Canada has indicated that it is willing to consider rapid “at home” testing. Still, there is little evidence that he is actually considering it.

It is to be expected that many of the regular readers are already tired of repeatedly hearing various points that could be considered of great relevance, even so, it is necessary to treat them and in reference to this they can be treated based on the basic figures of Canada, which Needless to say, they are not worthy of satisfaction, much less pride, since 3,900 cases and 244 deaths per million have been established, thus ranking Canada in 17th and 25th place among 37 OECD countries, respectively. Now, it could be said that most of Ottawa’s sins were committed many months ago by reducing pandemic threat monitoring to focus on vaping of all things, thus ensuring that the risk to Canada was low, send PPE by plane to China and poke fun at anyone who suggested closing borders or wearing masks. The fact is, most of the blame is not on the feds. Neither does most of the solution.

Denial of new and effective methods

It has been argued that where the feds remain stuck is refusing to approve new and faster test methods. And it is that just three weeks ago Health Canada publicly expressed its willingness to even consider the approval of rapid tests “at home”, that is, those that are not administered by a trained health professional and processed in a laboratory.

It should be noted that this will has not been translated into any serious action. With Edmonton-based GLC Medical Inc. announced on Thursday that its 60-second saliva-based COVID-19 test would undergo a clinical trial among travelers at the city’s airport, details will be announced, which will begin sometime this fall, which is a season that ends in three months. That’s the pointy end of the rapid test baton in Canada so far, and it’s not very encouraging.

Also, it is worth mentioning that some of these tests may actually offer advantages over “gold standard” PCR tests — the laboratory-processed nasopharyngeal swab procedure that many Canadians have already endured. But let’s accept for the sake of argument that, despite their speed and simplicity, they are fundamentally less accurate: they are more likely to produce false positives and false negatives.

Source: Chris Selley | National Post