Canadian companies unite to start mass virus testing

TORONTO» As frustration mounts in Canada at the leaden weight of lockdowns and the glacial pace of vaccinations, a consortium of some of the country’s largest companies has launched a rapid testing program with the aim of protecting their 350,000 employees and publishing a playbook for businesses across Canada on how to reopen safely.

The program, believed to be the first of its kind among the Group of 7 industrialized nations, has attracted the attention of the Biden administration.

The 12 companies, including Canada’s biggest airline and grocery chain, have worked together for four months to create a 400-page operating manual on how to run rapid antigen tests in various work settings. They began piloting the tests in their workplaces this month and expect to expand the program to 1,200 small and medium-size businesses.

They also plan to share their test results with government health authorities, greatly raising test counts in the country and providing an informal study of the virus’ spread among asymptomatic people.

“It’s like wartime — people get together to do something that’s in the interest of everybody,” said Marc Mageau, senior vice president of refining and logistics with Suncor Energy, the country’s largest oil producer, which introduced the testing to its employees this month.

While vaccines are considered the world’s best weapon for defeating the pandemic, most experts believe it will take months, if not a full year, for Canada to reach vaccination levels that allow workplaces to safely return to their pre-COVID operations.

Canada is in the grip of a second pandemic wave that has driven infections to record levels and deaths to about 19,800. In response, many parts of the country are in lockdown, with restaurants, theaters and nonessential retail shops closed.

The Canadian economy has contracted about 5% during the pandemic. Some industries, such as real estate and manufac

turing, have done well, but employment has plummeted in others, like entertainment and hospitality, which depend on public crowds.

The companies in the consortium were brought together in the spring by Ajay Agrawal, founder of the University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab, which helps science and technology startups. They were inspired by the most Canadian of muses: author Margaret Atwood.

“How soon can we have a cheap, buy-it-at-the-drugstore, self-administered test?” Atwood asked last May during a virtual meeting of business leaders and others tasked with brainstorming ideas for economic recovery during the pandemic.

The problem, the group posited, was the “information gap” — because there was no way to tell who might be an asymptomatic carrier, everyone was treated as a potential threat.

Atwood envisioned something like a home pregnancy test.

“That would be a game changer,” she said.

Realizing that the government was overwhelmed by the health crisis, the group decided to take on the task itself, forming a consortium led by Creative Destruction Lab.

The group focused on antigen tests because of their speed, price and utility: They can produce results in minutes, don’t require a laboratory and, in Canada, can cost between $5 and about $20.

But they are less accurate and produce more false negatives than the goldstandard polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, tests, which can cost 20 times as much. The three antigen tests approved for use in Canada flag between 84% and 96.7% of the people infected with the virus.

In Britain, antigen tests used in a mass testing campaign identified just twofifths of the coronavirus cases detected by PCR tests.

For that reason, many experts in Canada and elsewhere initially argued it was wiser to expand PCR testing. But as the pandemic stretched on and the country failed to reach its testing targets, that thinking has changed, said Dr. Irfan Dhalla, leader of the Canadian advisory panel on testing and screening for COVID-19, which recommended the country increase the use of rapid tests.

“A rapid antigen test is clearly better than no test at all, as long as it is not used as a free pass,” Dhalla said. “Whether it’s a workplace or a school, you still have to wear a mask and you still have to physically distance as much as you can.”

Consortium members hope in the long run that the testing program will help reduce infection rates enough to permit a return to crowded restaurants and boardroom meetings. But in the meantime, they plan to use the tests as an added layer of protection — on top of wearing masks, engaging in social distancing and screening employees so those with symptoms stay home.

In September, more than 100 employees from the consortium began working together, at their companies’ expense, to draft a plan. Two retired generals volunteered to help manage logistics.

In November, the group registered as a nonprofit organization called CDL Rapid Screening Consortium, with each company contributing $230,000 for operational costs.

Working in teams, the employees researched some 50 different antigen tests emerging around the world, analyzed what was needed for a screening program — from staffing to the number of gowns — and estimated the overall cost.

The resulting 400-page operating manual includes information from an example of an employee invitation to join the program and a standard consent form to the detailed shopping list of materials required to run a program.

In January, five of the companies began to pilot the program in settings as different as pharmacies and radio stations. So far, some 400 employees have volunteered, and almost 1,900 tests have been conducted. Only three have come back positive, according to Sonia Sennik, executive director of the Creative Destruction Lab and the enthusiastic quarterback of the project.

“They didn’t go into the workplace and potentially spread something,” Sennik said. “We broke the chain of transmission three times.”