Q&A: Infectious disease specialist says COVID rapid tests difficult to get this season

An infectious diseases expert says people should be cautious over the holidays with COVID-19, RSV and influenza circulating across the province.

Dr. Lisa Barrett with the Dalhousie University School of Medicine, said while many people will be planning to attend parties and family gatherings over the next couple of weeks, there are things you can do if you think you may be sick, including staying at home. 

She added that it may be a bit more difficult to protect yourself this season because it is harder to get a COVID-19 rapid test. She said that if you are looking for rapid tests, you can call 1-833-797-7772 to speak to Nova Scotia Health on getting take-home tests.

She spoke with Information Morning's Portia Clark about how people can protect themselves this holiday season.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Now to the big question: how much COVID is out there right now?

Well, there's lots of respiratory viruses out there right now and we have a couple of ways of measuring COVID at the moment. There's the test that we do at the hospital, tests you do at home. There's wastewater, which the federal government does. Then there's looking around at how many drippy people there are in your circle. So, by all accounts still lots of COVID around.

Are the variants that you're seeing severe? What kinds of variants are circulating?

Similar variants for the rest of Canada and in North America, for the most part. In terms of severity, [it's] difficult to know if that's a virus thing or a population immunity thing, but it does seem to be that most healthy humans don't end up in hospitals, so that's great. Relatively, a less severe disease than three years ago. But since August, we've had about 400 people who have had COVID and a good chunk of them end up in hospital if they're older or immunocompromised. 

Compared to the common cold, COVID-19 is different and special, just like influenza is more severe and special. And both of those things at the moment are circulating as well as, of course, RSV. COVID, influenza, RSV, you can get more than one of them at once, so if you're somebody who's older or immunocompromised, 'tis the season for fun, but also to be a little more careful for respiratory viruses.

Which brings us to testing, and that's difficult to do because there's not a lot of those home test kits and the ones that we have are expired. So where can we get those and why can't we get more of them?

There is a supply in Nova Scotia that was procured for use by the public for self-testing and that was really one of the things we did really well during the COVID pandemic and people got some autonomy and self-control over knowing that they had COVID.

You are correct, there are not a lot of places at the moment to be able to get tests and we want the people who are older and immunocompromised to have those tests, because you could qualify for treatment that keeps you from getting sick. That's why we want to test. It's a gap right now. It's the most common question I get on my social media.

Please reach out to … Nova Scotia Health. They can help you out with tracking down where you might find tests. The mobile public health units around the province, they will always have them and they also have vaccines. [it's] not too late to get those. But really if folks are a bit worried and they're older about getting tests, they're kind of right. It's hard right now.

Why is it so hard to get these tests? We have some of them but I guess not enough for wide availability like we recall from the height of COVID.

There are some amazing community partners who were able to supply them to the public at that time and, to your point, they were less available because we didn't have as many. Certainly, that situation changed.… But to the best of my knowledge, it is very difficult to get. In Halifax Regional Municipality right now, I think there's only one place you can get a PCR [test] for COVID, at the drive-through [in Dartmouth], so also limited availability. 

If people are worried and concerned about being able to know if they have COVID, they've got a right to that at the moment. Reach out, ask people to help change that. I think that's an important piece of feedback from the public as well as for people. 

And I suppose the reminder is out there for people to get vaccinated. For people who haven't been vaccinated, what are the percentages right now and how much of a concern might that be?

To the best of my knowledge, those numbers don't get published, so I don't know the answer to that.

My sense is that there's not a huge uptick and uptake of vaccines in some of the groups that we really, really are concerned about. What I would say this morning is it's not too late, it is important and the same is true for flu and for some folks, older folks living in long term care settings, RSV vaccine is still covered and that's something to consider. Help support your family and friends to [get] to those appointments, lots of them around and they're free for those folks. And there is a website that gives a map where COVID tests are available at some of those libraries around the province, just not in HRM.

There's also a map, a website where people can go and know where the public health mobile unit is.