Province to begin rapid testing in select northern communities
A month ago the federal government dispatched to Alberta COVID tests that provide results in about 15 minutes, and next month Alberta Health Services will begin using them in select regions.
AHS and Alberta Precision Laboratories have been evaluating the Abbott IDNow and Pan Bio COVID-19 testing kits for the past two months.
These rapid tests were purchased by the federal government and have already been approved by Health Canada.
The more than 100,000 tests though will not be considered reliable, and each one will be verified by APL in what the government is calling a pilot program.
The Pan Bio rapid antigen tests will be used at one assessment centre in Calgary and one assessment centre in Edmonton. The IDNow tests will be used in Slave Lake, St. Paul and at the hospital lab in Bonneville.
There was no response from Alberta Health on whether Medicine Hat would be getting any.
They will only be used for people who are in the first seven days of symptoms.
Two swabs will be collected from each patient. All negative tests from both systems will be subject to confirmation by the existing lab-based polymer chain-reaction testing method done by APL. This is because a negative rapid result is not as reliable as a PCR test and the test may miss some COVIDpositive samples, according to a government website.
Abbott’s website states that the IDNow had a sensitivity of 95 per cent and specificity of 97.9 per cent within seven days of the onset of symptoms.
The Abbott IDNow is a molecular test and the PanBio an antigen test. The federal government’s allocation to Alberta was 42 IDNow machines and 30,000 tests, plus 280,000 PanBio tests.
The federal government’s purchase agreement with Abbott is for a total of 7.9 million tests.
Rapid COVID tests are being used widely across the world. In September the U.K. announced it had ordered
5,000 machines and 5.8 million testing cartridges of the Nudge test designed by the Imperial College London. It had a 94 per cent accuracy. Other countries introduced them at airports to determine if a traveller was positive for COVID before they left the airport.
None of Alberta Health,
AHS nor APL have been willing to state what the accuracy rate is of the PCR test currently being done in Alberta.
Earlier this year Canada acquired 5,500 Spartan Bioscience hand-held COVID19 tests kits that could provide test results within an hour. They were to be used primarily in rural areas.
In early May, AHS said it was returning the nine devices it had received and had been working 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.”