Labs can double test rate to 60,000 per day, Tam says

Provinces should use tests for ‘right people’ at ‘right time,’ doctor says

OTTAWA— We have supplies. We have lab capacity. Now it’s about using them to test for COVID-19 in the best way as provinces relax coronavirus lockdowns, Canada’s top public health officer says.

Speaking on Parliament Hill, Dr. Theresa Tam said Thursday that public health laboratories across Canada now have the capacity to conduct 60,000 COVID-19 tests per day — more than double the daily average of more than 25,000 carried out over the past week.

Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, said while provinces still need to increase how many tests they are doing, it might not be necessary to use the country’s full testing capacity every day. It’s better to continue using these tests for “the right people, at the right place, in the right time,” Tam said.

That way any new surge of infections can be caught and dealt with as health restrictions that have shuttered schools, businesses and public spaces across Canada are slowly lifted in the coming days and weeks, she said.

“Testing remains a very key aspect of the next phase, because we want to tread carefully. And if there’s any inkling of cases or clusters, provinces will be homing in on those really, really fast so that we don’t get any further escalations after we’ve calmed down the first wave,” said Tam.

Tam reported Thursday that more than one million people have been tested across the country since the beginning of the pandemic.

In recent days, Ontario Premier Doug Ford has vented frustration about the level of testing in his province, which trails other jurisdictions, according to the federal government’s daily summary of COVID-19 data. Quebec, the province with the most deaths and infections, has also fallen short of its daily testing target so far, according to its top health official.

But the national supply of necessary testing components — flagged as an obstacle to broader testing in late March — seems to be addressed for the time being.

As of Wednesday, the federal government had received about two million swabs used for extracting samples from people being tested for the virus “above and beyond” what provinces and local health authorities have ordered themselves, Procurement Minister Anita Anand’s office told the Star by email.

The Public Health Agency of Canada has also secured a steady, domestic supply of reagents, the chemicals used to extract the molecular code of the virus from samples that are taken. Last week, the government inked a contract with New Brunswick-based LuminUltra, a chemical manufacturer that will supply the agency with enough material for 500,000 tests per week until March 2021.

LuminUltra’s chair and chief executive officer, Pat Whalen, told the Star the company has already delivered enough chemicals for 1.5 million tests and that the materials are being distributed by the federal health agency to provinces and territories roughly in proportion to their populations.