By EverythingGP Staff

Slave Lake included

Alberta to pilot rapid COVID-19 testing program

Nov 26, 2020 | 4:23 PM

The province will soon begin piloting point-of-care rapid testing for COVID-19 at select sites around Alberta.

The province says in a release that over the last two months, Alberta Health Services (AHS) and Alberta Precision Laboratories (APL) have been working to evaluate the effectiveness of the Abbott IDNow and PanBio COVID-19 testing kits, which have been approved by Health Canada and provided to provinces and territories by the federal government.

More than 100,000 tests are being made available for distribution to targeted sites in the province. This includes the PanBio rapid antigen tests being used at one assessment centre in Calgary and one assessment centre in Edmonton.

The IDNow tests will begin to be used at the COVID-19 assessment centres in Slave Lake and St. Paul, and at the hospital lab in Bonnyville.

“Adding point-of-care rapid testing to our COVID-19 testing capacity will allow for the identification and notification of positive COVID-19 cases in under 20 minutes, speeding up the appropriate care and isolation of patients, which will reduce the risk of further spread,” said Health Minister Tyler Shandro, in a release.

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The tests will only be used on patients who are within the first seven days of showing symptoms. The province says this will allow health officials to quickly identify positive cases, reducing the need for patient samples to be transported to centralized public laboratories for processing.

“Fast-tracking the testing process will allow our laboratory services and health-care teams to prioritize the cases that are still infectious, and focus our efforts where we can have the greatest impact on preventing further transmission,” said Mauro Chies, APL board chair and vice-president, Cancer Care Alberta & Clinical Support Services, Alberta Health Service.

“It will also free up capacity and further reduce turnaround times for the lab-based COVID-19 testing that our provincial labs will continue to provide as part of the provincial testing program.”

The province adds that to ensure the validity of the results, two swabs will be collected from each patient, and all negative tests from both systems will be subject to confirmation by the existing lab-based polymerase chain-reaction (PCR) testing method. This is because a negative test result is not as reliable as it is on a PCR test, and the rapid test may miss some COVID-positive samples.

Officials will use this pilot project to determine how to streamline processes like results notifications and digital record keeping before the tests are deployed widely across the province.