Alberta plans to ramp up efforts on rapid testing
By Medicine Hat News on February 12, 2021.
This week the provincial government announced the expansion of rapid COVID-19 testing that can give results within about 15 minutes. All operators of long-term care and designated supportive living facilities will be required to set up a program to test staff at least once per week, and the Alberta government will provide the testing kits and other supports, said Tom McMillan, assistant director of communications for Alberta Health. “The program will be expanding province-wide starting next week. The goal is to reach all 36,000 staff in facilities in Medicine Hat and across Alberta,” said McMillan. Operators in Medicine Hat and this region could start using the system within a month. “All facilities are expected to submit an implementation plan by the end of February. Depending on supply availability, we hope all sites will have the screening up and running by mid-March,” said McMillan. The first shipment of rapid COVID tests arrived at the end of October from the federal government, which has a purchase agreement with Abbott Diagnostics for 7.9 million tests. Initially Alberta Health Services and Alberta Precision Laboratories evaluated the Abbott IDNow (a molecular test) and Pan Bio (an antigen test) COVID-19 testing kits. By the end of November the Pan Bio rapid antigen tests were being used at an assessment centre in Calgary, another in Edmonton and then expanded to Slave Lake, St. Paul and the hospital lab in Bonneville. At this stage they were only being used for people who were in the first seven days of symptoms and were then followed with a PCR test if the rapid test was negative. The rapid tests were also being used for research purposes, an AHS spokesperson told the News in December. “We are starting to deploy rapid point-of-care testing in clinical pilots in order to continue gathering data for our evaluations on the sensitivity of rapid testing systems compared to in-lab PCR testing. At the same time, it is being used to diagnose patients, as positive results are considered valid.,” said Kerry Williamson, spokesperson for AHS. Last spring Canada acquired 5,500 Spartan Bioscience hand-held COVID-19 tests kits that could provide test results within an hour. They were to be used primarily in rural areas. In early May 2020, AHS said it was returning the nine devices it had received and had been testing to validate before using in clinical settings. AHS cited concerns about the efficacy of the tests. Spartan had accepted a voluntary recall and said it was “performing additional clinical studies to assess the sampling method and proprietary swab.” 14-13
