Montreal should follow Calgary’s testing lead

Premier François Legault has often boasted of how Quebec has completed far more COVID-19 tests per capita than Ontario and many other jurisdictions, as if this were a measure of success in the government’s pandemic response.

The one province Legault never mentions, however, is Alberta, which Quebec’s Institut national de santé publique notes correctly is the sole Canadian jurisdiction that has consistently tested the most since the start of the coronavirus crisis.

Alberta has also gone one step further than Quebec despite the fact that it has reported far fewer cases of COVID -19.

On May 11, Alberta’s low-profile chief medical officer, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, announced the province would test 1,000 asymptomatic people daily in Calgary for a week. The government would offer the tests to people who do not work from home.

The campaign attracted more than 3,400 people in the Calgary area. The results revealed that 75 people who did not exhibit any symptoms of COVID -19 still tested positive among a group of 430 people whom authorities later learned shared one thing in common: they all had been in close contact with someone who had previously tested positive for the coronavirus.

However, of the remaining 3,000 who were tested, 48 people each received a phone call from public health officials advising them they had contracted the virus even though they did not know anyone who had COVID -19.

“The goal of asymptomatic testing is to help identify new cases in places where exposure is most likely and to better understand how COVID -19 is spreading within the province,” Tom Mcmillan, assistant director of communications for Alberta Health Services, said by email on Wednesday.

“We will continue to conduct asymptomatic testing as appropriate to help learn more about the spread of the virus.”

Alberta’s targeted approach to testing asymptomatic people has been widely praised by epidemiologists as an efficient use of public health resources, not only deepening the government’s knowledge of the extent of the contagion in the hot spot of Calgary, but conveying the reassuring message that authorities are leaving no stone unturned in the pandemic.

“I think what was done in Calgary was out of a sense of caution and was reasonable,” said Dr. Abdu Sharkawy, an infectious diseases specialist at the University Health Network in Toronto.

“Grocers, people who work in public transit, Uber drivers — these are individuals who can’t help but be in frequent contact with the public at large,” he explained. “If they happen to become sources of infection, they can potentially cause dissemination of infection throughout multiple households and throughout the community. They can effectively be super-spreaders.”

In Montreal, testing asymptomatic people is all the more important since the government allowed many retail stores to reopen on Monday, and last Friday, public gatherings of up to 10 people were permitted. Even though the number of new cases has dropped in Montreal in the past three weeks, it’s still the epicentre of the pandemic in Canada and it continues to post daily numbers that are much higher than the tallies of entire provinces. Alberta, for example, disclosed 25 new cases on Wednesday, compared with 223 for Montreal.

Despite Legault’s oft-repeated remark about Quebec testing so much more than elsewhere, the province has a checkered record on screening. Health Minister Danielle Mccann vowed on April 8 to test all workers and residents of long-term care centres, only to acknowledge 10 days later that this could not be done.

Belatedly, testing is going on in nursing homes. In Montreal, the public health department has ramped up testing in the community but will screen only those who have flu-like symptoms or asymptomatic individuals who have been in contact with someone who has received a positive result.

The Montreal Gazette asked the public health department whether it intends to follow Calgary’s lead in testing people who work with the public who are asymptomatic. Jean Nicolas Aubé, a spokesperson for the department, responded that “Montreal public health does not plan to do like Calgary.”

The absence of such testing not only deprives authorities of the true picture of the evolving contagion, it fuels suspicions Quebec may be pursuing a hidden agenda.

“There has been a laggard response to the amount of viral activity that has surfaced in the community,” Sharkawy said of Quebec’s and Ontario’s responses to the pandemic. “There has been a hastiness toward inviting business interests as a priority with opening up the economy, at the expense of better understanding how well the pandemic is being controlled.”