Why Isn’t Canada doing more rapid testing for COVID when even the Canadian Testing and Screening Advisory Panel says it’s a good idea? Some Provinces are starting to see the value in screening for COVID-19 combined with using PCR for confirmation testing. As Alberta Chief medical officer of health, Dr. Deena Hinshaw told Global News “rapid testing is helpful when samples are gathered from a population over a period of time. Hinshaw described them as a “red-light test,” which means anyone who tests positive gets a “stop” signal and isn’t allowed to enter a workplace or community setting. It is possible for someone’s rapid test to be negative, and the person to still become infectious that day, and stressed rapid tests don’t replace current health measures.”
But shouldn’t rapid, self-administered Covid-19 tests should be available to anyone who asks for them says because even with a vaccine we still need rapid tests says William A. Haseltine in a recent Forbes article sites some of the many uses for rapid tests. In his, article Haseltine sites that the US, like Canada, has lagged giving access to and then the distribution of rapid tests that could be used alongside other tests in the fight against COVID. He states “The failure of the United States to provide these tests to all its citizens, many months into the pandemic, is multilayered. First and foremost was the failure at the highest levels of federal government to understand the power of rapid testing in curbing the spread of Covid-19. Even when the US administration buckled down and bought up hundreds of millions of rapid tests in August, they still failed to devise a national strategy for distributing the tests efficiently and intelligently. “
We are still able to utilize rapid test screening like so many other countries, but only if we start to use them.
