Ep. 14: The Truth About COVID-19 Testing
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The need for more testing has existed throughout the pandemic. To stop COVID-19, you need to be able to see it and assess how many people have it. Most jurisdictions in North America are nowhere near the ideal yet. To learn what’s going on, host Shaun Francis spoke to one of the most outspoken of the experts on the issue, Dr. Lauren Lapointe-Shaw.
Lauren Lapointe-Shaw is an MD/Ph.D. clinical epidemiologist and scientist at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute and an adjunct scientist at IC/ES, formerly the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, Ontario’s independent, non-profit, world-leading research organization that uses population-based health and social data to produce knowledge on a broad range of health care issues.
Mentioned in this ep:
The symptom tracker mentioned by Dr. Lauren Lapointe-Shaw is COVIDnearyou.org.
The UK prof who questions whether lockdown measures were necessary because responsible people were physical distancing even before governments enacted their regulations is Prof. Carl Heneghan. Mentioning his theories is this piece in the Daily Mail.
Following is an edited synopsis of some of Dr. Lapointe-Shaw’s key points:
Shaun: What’s your assessment on how Canada’s been doing for testing?
Lauren: Some countries have been able to dramatically expand testing. China was able to ramp up faster than anyone. Singapore, from the beginning, had massive testing abilities to a level that we still don't have. It seems that it's been a persistent struggle in Canada. What's missing is an understanding of how many people are actually having symptoms of potential COVID-19, and how many are not getting tested. Some places in Canada still restrict testing to people who are high risk for complications or for transmitting the virus to other groups. That means the average person who has new symptoms, unfortunately, might not be able to access testing. That’s a problem because right now, we see trends, but they’re distorted. It's quite important to be able to test all people with symptoms. As far as expanding testing, that’s where we should go.
Shaun: Is herd immunity an inevitable end-state in Canada? Even if we don’t get a vaccine, can we plan on achieving some sort of herd immunity eventually?
Lauren: I would think so. If the vaccine happens before we reach that point, that would be fantastic. Right now based on the estimates of how many people have had COVID-19 in Canada, we're nowhere near the ballpark of herd immunity. We are like one drop in a bathtub. Because even if you assume the numbers we’re seeing now represent just a tenth of the total cases, we're still only talking about one or two percent of the total population having had COVID-19. So we have a long way to go. The other issue is, we only get to herd immunity if being immune lasts long enough to matter. So if people are only immune for a month, then you can imagine that we would never really get to herd immunity.
Shaun: Contact tracing with AI-enabled smartphone apps represents one way that other countries are containing outbreaks. Do you see that working in Canada?
Lauren: The question is, will the public accept this invasion of privacy? In South Korea, people are contact traced indirectly via their cell phones. If you go out and see another person, your phone pings off their phone. There’s a record that you were in proximity to this other person. That information is stored, and if anyone ends up being positive, there's an easy, automatic process to alert the owners of other phones—you were near someone who had COVID-19, and now you should self-isolate. The faster you move with contact tracing, the more effective it is. The sticky point is, this method requires people to give up their personal information. And that has raised some concern about data privacy and security.
Please subscribe and rate us on your favourite podcast platform. Eat Move Think host Shaun Francis is Medcan’s CEO and chair. Follow him on Twitter @shauncfrancis. Connect with him on LinkedIn. And follow him on Instagram @shauncfrancis. Eat Move Think is produced by Ghost Bureau.
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