Thought of the Day - September 8 2021 - Does Mass Testing Still Matter?

So, we have talked about SARS-CoV-2 virus and thus the COVID disease is not going away anytime soon. We have talked about the importance of vaccines, but how they are only part of the solution. So let's look at another tool used to tackle the pandemic - Mass Testing.

Canada is estimated to have spent over five billion dollars on COVID testing over the past eighteen months. In the early days, testing was used to try to get a handle on the spread, to aid in tracking and tracing, and to identify breakouts in institutions, particularly those housing vulnerable citizens. And, over time, to confirm if anyone, who thought they potentially had COVID, actually did.

As we learned that infection spreads largely through travel and mass gatherings, testing strategies evolved to be a system of control, focussing on travel and used as a requisite for gatherings - for example, a reopening condition for the film industry here in BC was repeat mass testing ( Thought of the Day - September 3 - Blow at High Dough ). Moreover, testing data was also needed to justify and assess the effectiveness of lockdown strategies.

And as we have talked about before, flaws in testing and subsequent tracing practices led to a number of issues such as "Casedemics" ( Thought of the Day - July 28 2021 - PCR Testing, Again ) and "Pingdemics" ( Thought of the Day - August 18 2021 - Apps Gone Wild ).

In addition, new tests were added, those that detected antibodies as well as the virus itself (antigen) - these also provided valuable information concerning who had been infected and not detected as well as a confirmation of vaccination effects.

But what happens now? We know that SARS-CoV-2 is widespread in the community. We know that the majority of infected people are "asymptomatic". Some testing is needed in order to provide indicative data for assessing case-rates trends as well as what variants are in the mix. Moreover, if someone is significantly symptomatic then a test that confirms the cause is beneficial (as if the issue is something other than COVID we have treatments). And also testing is needed so that those at the highest risk can be addressed proactively. But these are all just the standard practices for many infectious diseases. This is a far cry from needing to spend tens of millions per week across the country, needing to routinely inconvenience a significant cross-section of the population, and needing to publish daily numbers so that sites like this blog can keep people concerned.

So questions are now being asked:

• What is the value in our government continuing to foot the bill for "discretionary" testing (I got a PCR test when I was down in New Brunswick last month, looking back on it I am not really sure why)?

• When is the time to wind down mass testing?

• What is the real benefit of continued mass testing in the first place?

Questions like these are getting harder to answer all the time.

Cheers

Cliff