BREWER HOURS EXTENDED
Demand for COVID tests grows
Ottawa's Brewer assessment centre is now open longer and later for COVID -19 testing, the first in a promised series of improvements to local testing operations that officials hope will cut down the hourslong wait times and other barriers to testing that have had some Ottawans at wits' end in recent days.
“Seeing the long lines at the local testing centres has been frustrating for many of us, myself included,” Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson said at Wednesday's technical briefing on the local COVID-19 testing strategy. “We understand this can be very discouraging, particularly if you're bringing children when you get tested.”
Watson said he's spoken with the presidents of the hospitals operating the local COVID -19 testing sites, and “made it clear the situation must be resolved as quickly as possible,” particularly as colder weather approaches.
As a first step, effective Wednesday, the assessment centre at Brewer Arena is open from 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week. Increasing the hours of operation at Ottawa's existing testing sites is “obviously the easiest way to expand quickly,” said Dr. Alan Forster, the local testing strategy lead and a vice-president at The Ottawa Hospital.
Also in the pipeline are a new east-end testing centre, an appointment-based clinic at the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre for those who can't travel to the other testing sites, online booking systems to allow appointment-based testing at existing sites, and work to double the daily testing capacity at the Moodie and Heron care clinics, from 500 to 1,000.
Forster explained the barriers that make the rapid expansion of local testing capacity a difficult task indeed: the need to hire and train qualified staff, limited lab capacity and available testing equipment, and the search for logistically appropriate spaces where testing can be run safely, to name a few.
By early afternoon Wednesday, slightly more than 300 parents and children had formed a lineup stretching three lengths of the adjacent soccer field for COVID-19 testing at Brewer Arena. After a four-hour wait, Meaghan McGregor estimated she and her three-yearold daughter were about 30 minutes from reaching the front of the line.
McGregor, a construction worker, had to take Tuesday and Wednesday off work, and likely the rest of the week, without pay, after her daughter's Carleton Place daycare called her to say she had a runny nose and sneeze, and needed to either isolate for 14 days or get a negative COVID-19 test result before returning.
“This is pretty crazy,” McGregor said of the current situation that has overwhelmed centres like Brewer as students return to school. “I think it's going to be a long winter for people, because this is obviously not the end of this. Kids get colds in the winter, so this is probably not the last time she gets tested.”
Around 12:45 p.m. Wednesday, the Montfort Hospital published a tweet notifying the public that the COVID-19 care clinic and testing facility on Heron Road, having reaching maximum capacity, had closed for the day, more than twoand-a-half hours before it was supposed to.
At another of Ottawa's four official COVID -19 testing facilities, on Moodie Drive in the city's west end, “People are waiting up to eight hours for a COVID test,” tweeted Ottawa Centre MPP Joel Harden, who raised the issue in the Ontario legislature Wednesday after speaking to an Ottawa resident in the lineup.
The fourth testing site, a drivethru in the parking lot of the baseball stadium on Coventry Road, is open only to people with appointments and access to a vehicle.
“We're just going to ramp up the testing like you've never seen before,” said Ontario Premier Doug Ford, facing questions about lineups and wait times at his daily news conference.
While he declined to give an exact launch date, he said the province has been working for months to get the private sector involved in providing testing.
“Be it the Rexalls or the Shoppers, or the Loblaws or the Walmarts, everyone's coming to the table,” said Ford, predicting the addition of a couple of thousand testing sites in Ontario.
“The second wave is coming. We're prepared to get everything ramped up.”
Forster, the local testing-strategy lead, was peppered with questions from Ottawa city councillors at Wednesday's technical briefing.
Innes Ward Coun. Laura Dudas asked about the plan for winter, when long outdoor lineups would get unbearable, quickly. Forster is hopeful the new booking systems will eliminate the need for lineups, and said his team is also considering locations where the testing process could occur entirely indoors.
Barrhaven Ward Coun. Jan Harder inquired about the feasibility of bringing in the military to set up sites and clear the backlog of Ottawa residents in need of testing.
“Reaching out to the military may be something worth considering,” Forster said.
Knoxdale-Merivale Ward Coun. Keith Egli wanted to know if a triage system was up for consideration, considering the number of people without any COVID-19 symptoms still showing up for testing.
“The issue is that there are different messages coming out across the systems as to who should get tested and what are the rights of people to have tests done,” Forster said.
In a departure from past messaging, Ottawa Public Health now only recommends testing for people with symptoms or close contact with a confirmed case, considering the demand on the system and the limited utility of asymptomatic testing.
“Testing is not going to see us through this alone,” Forster said. “This crisis requires a much broader action and broader approach to solving the problem than simply looking at the number of tests we can do per day.” tblewett@postmedia.com