Designated COVID-19 testing sites will be vital to curb outbreak, take pressure off ERs: specialist
Designated sites can test people with symptoms, while limiting exposure to public
Designated COVID-19 testing sites, set up away from hospital grounds, will be "instrumental" in helping to contain the outbreak, according to infectious disease specialist Dr. Sumon Chakrabarti.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a $1-billion package to help Canadians cope with the spread of COVID-19, including money to increase access to testing. The WHO declared the outbreak a global pandemic on Wednesday afternoon.
A designated site has been opened in Quebec, where patients can get tested without coming into contact with the wider population. The province is planning two more, with similar moves being discussed in Ontario and Alberta.
Dr. Chakrabarti spoke to The Current's Matt Galloway about the benefits of separate testing sites.
These designated testing sites — why is having them important in this country?
They're imperative because one of the big worries about COVID-19 is that if we have lots of cases in a short period of time, it could overwhelm the health-care system. And what this does is this takes a lot of pressure off the emergency departments. In the last several weeks, patients have been going to the emergency department to get tested. Many of these people, thankfully, are not that ill, but you can see that its volume added to their already big caseload. So these clinics will allow us to offload that, get testing done quickly in a streamlined manner.
How do they operate? How do they work?
In general, what happens is you have a specialized area that has the ability to isolate patients. So they're not, of course, sitting in one big waiting area that they could potentially infect each other. The staff is protected. The people are then tested with a swab.
Also, we can have certain video capabilities in some of the clinics, where they can look at the patient and go, 'Well, maybe that patient needs to come into the hospital rather than go home.'
It also has the ability to test for other viruses as well, not just COVID-19. We're also monitoring influenza, for example. It's another good way of getting that testing. So it's kind of like an all-in-one, one-stop shop, if you will.
It's something that's really, really helpful for the outbreak — it's going to be instrumental.
And there's discretion with the doctors, in terms of who gets tested?
That is the case, but that is rapidly changing. So, for example, the beginning of the outbreak, we would only test people, for example, who came back from certain countries like China or Iran.
But rapidly, we're seeing that now it's any travel and eventually we're going to start to have anybody with respiratory symptoms and certainly a number of hospitals in the Greater Toronto Area that I could speak for have been doing that. So the testing is quite broad and we're trying to capture everybody to be able to get ahead of this.
How long does it take until you figure out the results?
It can come back very quickly. So in my experience, at least at my hospital when we have done them, some of these tests have been coming back in 24 hours.
In Alberta last week, the chief medical officer there said that they're going to look at retesting older influenza samples in that province for COVID-19. What do you make of that?
The reason for doing that is one of the problems — for example with Italy — was that they discovered the outbreak when it was already in the uptick, that exponential increase. And that's why they were already in the midst of the outbreak when they discovered it.
One of the things that we're trying to avoid here in Canada, learning from other places, is if you look back at some of these samples, you can get an idea: 'Well, look, were there cases of COVID-19 before, already circulating, and we didn't know about it?'
So far, there's no evidence of that.
Should that retesting be happening all across the country?
It depends on the situation. But it's something that's being discussed among the microbiologists and infectious disease practitioners.
If you're speaking to a Canadian who's worried that they have the coronavirus, what advice would you give them?
If you're feeling symptoms of, for example, fever, cough, respiratory symptoms, that type of thing, the best thing to do is phone your local health authorities.
Usually it's a public health unit, and there's numbers in every jurisdiction. They can tell you where to go, where the nearest testing centre is, or for example, if there isn't a testing centre and it needs to be done in the emergency department. They can help by calling ahead and making sure that you're put in an area where you're not exposing others, and the tests can be done. So this of course, this is an evolving situation. We're learning on the fly. But it is important that you ... call the public health unit, and they can help you.
Written by Padraig Moran. Produced by Alison Masemann and Caro Rolando.