Thought of the Day - May 4 2021 - PCR Testing Protest

On Saturday I was running some errands and came across a group protesting COVID-19 PCR testing up on Enterprise Street in front of Global BC just north of Lougheed. I did not stop long as the RCMP started to show up en-mass, I counted nine police vehicles. Guess they did not have a permit or something.

I checked the press the next day but could not find anything about it. Guess they did not have a celeb like Greta with them or something.

Looking at the placards it also struck me that they are right. Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) tests are intended to be used as a diagnostic tool. If you have symptoms indicative of an infection, PCR tests can be used to confirm if any of the common bacteria, parasites, viruses and fungi are to blame. They were never designed to be a mass testing tool. Heck, if we started mass screening people for things like the flu or common cold, we would find that a vast swath of the general public carries on normal lives riddled with all kinds of asymptomatic diseases.

In Canada, we have conducted over 30 million PCR COVID-19 tests to date. Conducting a test costs about $100 (private clinics charge upward of $150) and so this means we have spent about three billion dollars on this pursuit across the country since the pandemic was declared.

The reason PCR is the test of choice is they strike the balance between the more expensive and invasive serology (blood) tests, and the much less reliable so-called "rapid tests". Rapid tests have seen only limited use in BC. They are largely employed for tracking and tracing in long-term care facilities, rural and remote settings, correctional facilities, schools, Downtown Eastside and workplaces that have experienced outbreaks. Rapid tests may also be used for time-critical confirmation, such as just before surgeries.

While there is limited information as to how PCR tests are deployed, the best I can tell is only about 10% of these tests are used in the way they were intended, to medically confirm a symptomatic person has COVID-19. Another 10% are used, in conjunction with the rapid tests mentioned above, for tracking, screening and tracing. 30% are used by people who have self-diagnosed that they might have COVID. The majority are used as a matter of routine for example if you are a non-essential traveller, work as a caregiver, work on a movie set (where people are subjected to three tests a week) etc.

Some issues with mass PCR testing:

• Errors: One of the biggest issues with PCR testing is that they are not foolproof. There is a chance of false positives (requiring unnecessary quarantine) and negatives (giving a false sense of security). According to Health Officials in Ontario, the false positive rate is very low at about 0.01%, but when you scale the tests up to 30,000,000 tests, this means thousands of Canadians have been told they have COVID who did not. Moreover, the false-negative rate is about 2 percent. This means more than half a million potential carriers have been told they are good to go;

• Lack of granularity: Remember PCR tests are designed to greatly amplify any minute traces of the pathogen. Yet results are only expressed as either negative or positive, they don't differentiate between a stray nasal trace and a fully symptomatic infection. In addition, there has been minimal research concerning the contagiousness of asymptomatic cases. This binary "yes/no" could mean hundreds of thousands of Canadians have been quarantined with little real justification;

• The majority of the tests are wasted: It should be noted less than 5% of the tests we have conducted have come back positive, meaning 95% of PCR tests were really used to tell people they don't have COVID. However, as tests are just a point in time and are prone to false negatives, so people do not learn much from a single test, and therefore end up taking them over and over again.

In short, PCR tests are far from perfect, we are only using them as they are the best we have. Therefore it is great to see people in Canada expressing opinions and questioning what is going on. From what I saw this protest seemed focused and peaceful, it is just a shame some protests get more press than others. Coverage usually has little to do with the legitimacy of the claim, but rather more to do with how sensational the delivery.

Cheers

Cliff