Skip to main content
Open this photo in gallery:

Dr. Lisa Barrett speaks with volunteers assembling COVID-19 rapid test kits in Halifax this past Dec. 5.Photography by Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail

This is part of the Difference Makers, which highlights some of the people working to make Canada a better place in 2022.

Halifax’s The Dome nightclub had been closed to partygoers for months when Lisa Barrett found a novel use for the pandemic-shuttered venue.

On a Friday night in November of 2020, the infectious diseases doctor and her colleagues donned their personal protective equipment, grabbed their laptops and testing kits, and transformed the club into the first pop-up site in Canada to offer free rapid antigen testing to people without any COVID-19 symptoms.

Working in the coat check area and behind the bar, Dr. Barrett and her team swabbed 148 visitors to The Dome, most of them hospitality staff and young people who wanted to find out their COVID status before heading out for a night of fun.

The rapid tests, processed in about 15 minutes, caught one positive case – later confirmed by a gold-standard PCR test run in a lab – in a young man with no symptoms, who isolated himself in time to avoid infecting his housemates.

“That was night one, success one,” Dr. Barrett says.

Open this photo in gallery:

Dr. Barrett pressed early on to get Nova Scotians to take rapid antigen tests seriously.

Dr. Barrett has since become one of the country’s leading advocates for widespread access to rapid antigen testing, a pandemic control measure that could become even more crucial next year as Canada faces Omicron, a variant that is more transmissible than its predecessors.

The 46-year-old assistant professor in the division of infectious diseases at Dalhousie University made real change on the ground by helping persuade the Nova Scotia government to embrace rapid testing long before most other provinces.

Then she marshalled an army of volunteers to make the tests widely available without syphoning nurses and other health-care professionals away from their day-to-day work battling the pandemic.

“Using a volunteer workforce has been very, very effective,” says Todd Hatchette, chief of microbiology for Nova Scotia’s Capital District Health Authority, and one of Dr. Barrett’s partners in the testing campaign. “That’s a legacy she will always have.”

Open this photo in gallery:

Nasal swabs, sample tubes and other components are organized into the test kits.

Rapid antigen tests, which look for a protein on the surface of the coronavirus rather than the virus itself, can return results in minutes. However, they are considered less accurate than PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, tests processed in a lab.

The first rapid antigen tests that Health Canada approved in the fall of 2020 required brain-tickling nasopharyngeal swabs, which by regulation or policy in most provinces had to be performed by regulated health professionals.

Rapid-testing doubters wondered: Did it make sense to pull nurses away from the frontlines to offer an imperfect test to people who weren’t even sick?

Dr. Barrett had a better idea. She and a few of her colleagues wrote a letter to the Nova Scotia government entreating them to support rapid testing. Their plan included teaching volunteers to perform nasopharyngeal swabs and to run other parts of pop-up events using rapid antigen tests that were gathering dust in Dr. Hatchette’s lab. The federal government had purchased millions of tests and distributed them to provincial governments who at first seemed flummoxed about how best to use them.

“I wouldn’t have suggested it if we were going to take health professionals to do this,” Dr. Barrett says.

Volunteers flocked to the effort. Regular Haligonians, including Dr. Hatchette’s 20-year-old son, turned out to be excellent swab-takers. Dr. Barrett’s 71-year-old mother, Juanita, became a regular presence at the testing events.

Open this photo in gallery:

Completed kits are piled under the 'ready for Santa's sleigh' sign.

Since that first night at The Dome, Nova Scotia has held more than 1,200 pop-up events, performing about 320,000 rapid tests on site and, as of early December, finding more than 450 positive cases in people who perceived themselves to be symptom-free.

As Health Canada approved easier-to-use versions of antigen tests, Dr. Barrett’s crew – which includes more than 3,000 people who have volunteered at least once – shifted their focus to assembling take-home, self-testing kits.

They distributed the kits when the Halifax Wanderers soccer team invited crowds back into the stands. On weekend nights, they offered bar-hoppers “protection packs” that included a rapid test kit and a condom, a nod to Dr. Barrett’s prepandemic focus on HIV and Hepatitis C. (She worked for a time in the lab of U.S. presidential adviser Anthony Fauci, conducting research on the first of a new generation of drugs that cure Hepatitis C).

Volunteers even handed the rapid test kits out at this year’s Halifax Christmas parade, which Dr. Barrett led as marshal. “They stuffed me like a beauty queen in a Mercedes at the beginning of the parade,” she says, laughing and mimicking a royal wave. “Not in my training, I can tell you.”

Dr. Barrett, who grew up in a small Newfoundland fishing village called Old Perlican, says an underappreciated bonus of making rapid tests widely available at schools, clinics, libraries and pop-ups was the way it fostered solidarity among Nova Scotians. Volunteers and test-takers alike felt they had a role in controlling the virus, which increased their fidelity to other rules, she said.

Irfan Dhalla, co-chair of the federal government’s COVID-19 Testing and Screening Expert Advisory Panel, agrees that Dr. Barrett’s most important innovation was offering people a way to help at a time they felt helpless.

“One of the really extraordinary things Lisa recognized,” he says, “is the importance of empowering people.”

Read more about some of the people working to make Canada a better place in 2022 ⋅ Al EtmanskiSarah LazarovicMaayan ZivAshif MawjiRobert WrightMark Shieh


Rapid tests in Canada: More on The Decibel

Another person who’s been trying to get rapid antigen tests into Canadians’ hands is Dr. Dalia Hasan, founder of COVID Test Finders. She spoke on The Globe and Mail’s news podcast about her organization’s response to Omicron. Subscribe for more episodes.

Follow related authors and topics

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Interact with The Globe