There’s no doubt Canadians were relieved this week to see the first doses of COVID-19 vaccines getting injected into the arms of health care workers and people living in long-term care homes.
It’s a good news story – which explains why smiling politicians have put themselves front and centre as boxes of vials frozen to the temperature of dry ice have been walked across airport tarmacs, or into distribution centres.
The vaccine’s arrival is a great photo op. But it’s also a reminder of an earlier opportunity to save lives that was missed, and of the terrible cost it has forced Canadians to bear.
Where were the smiling pols when massive quantities of COVID-19 testing kits rolled out of Canadian factories beginning in March? Where were they when testing centres were opened with staffing and supplies far exceeding demand, or when lab capacity was exponentially expanded?
They didn’t show up, because these things never happened – at least not on a scale that could make a difference.
A lack of mass testing has been Canada’s biggest COVID-19 disaster, and it’s not over. Even today, with cases and deaths on the rise in most provinces, Ontario is the only place where residents, workers and essential visitors in long-term care homes are subject to biweekly surveillance testing.
Outside of Ontario LTC homes, free testing in every province is limited to people showing symptoms of COVID-19, or who have been in contact with someone who tested positive or is connected to an outbreak.
There continues to be an inexplicable reluctance to test asymptomatic people, and to organize mass surveillance testing of people in hot spots, such as warehouses, food-processing plants and factories. This despite the knowledge that much of the spread is asymptomatic or presymptomatic.
Opponents argue that the tests – both the lab-based polymerase chain reaction (PCR) ones that involve a nasal swabbing, and the new rapid tests that look for antigens in saliva – aren’t 100 per cent reliable, which means the amount of repeat testing required to accurately monitor asymptomatic cases would be large and expensive.
Fair enough. But fighting a pandemic almost exclusively through lockdown has been far more expensive. The bulk of Ottawa’s hundreds of billions of dollars in COVID-19 costs have been incurred not fighting the virus directly, but paying people to stay home.
In contrast, the NHL managed to play the 2020 playoffs by creating a bubble, with hundreds of people in it, that was kept virus-free through constant testing.
The same kind of test-powered bubble could have been built around the places housing the most vulnerable, namely long-term care homes. Most of the infections introduced into LTC homes by staff or visitors could have been prevented.
Remember, the novel coronavirus genome was identified early on, which enabled the rapid development of the PCR test used to detect Canada’s first COVID-19 case on Jan. 27.
Our governments could have taken determined action early in the year, with the same quasi-militaristic ethic now being used to distribute vaccines, to massively ramp up testing and lab capacity, and start getting swabs in asymptomatic noses by March.
Given the low number of cases at the time, some people would surely have criticized it as a waste of money.
But early mass testing – such as South Korea and other countries that successfully contained COVID-19 implemented – would have shown the degree to which the coronavirus was spreading, unseen, in the early months of the first wave.
That in turn would have led to better protection for seniors living in homes located in areas where community transmission was rampant. It could have saved thousands of lives, given that 80 per cent of Canada’s first-wave deaths happened in LTC and retirement homes.
Mass testing might have also helped keep case numbers low enough to allow contact tracers to do their jobs.
Instead, Canada’s governments chose to confront the virus while blindfolded. When they suddenly discovered it was everywhere, they had no choice but to resort to lockdowns, with all the pain that comes with them.
Make no mistake: Repeated extended lockdowns of the kind Canada is still living through, not to mention nearly 14,000 deaths and counting, are an admission that smarter, more targeted responses were never tried. They are an admission of failure.
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