There are only so many labs capable of running the tests and the assessment centres have been staffed by hospital workers who still need to work at the hospitals. The pharmacist idea is great but the labs will become a bottleneck. If Health Canada certifies the rapid test it will mean they can start doing swan tests to confirm only positives.
It's a PCR test. We could have been consolidating lab resources, identifying the machinery and operators. There are loads of PCR machines that probably aren't being used to run tests.
Hell, we could have sourced more machinery instead of stockpiling 10,000 ventilators as if we have the people needed to set-up and monitor that many ventilators.
We did nothing. We got to 30K and it was like "mission accomplished".
I'm not saying this would have been easy but it feels like we missed the mark again. There is additional lab capacity in a non-traditional sense where many, many labs have PCR machines and technicians (all of whom are qualified but some of whom have PhDs. These are trained, educated folks).
There was time if the government wanted to expand capacity internally and not use outside resources. We could have looked into buying more PCR machines among a list of other things.
I look across the border and New York State was running over 70,000 tests a day at certain points. I'm aware we don't have nearly that problem but it would be nice to have similar capacity relative to our population.
I get the solution would be more people self isolating and not getting tested and maybe 30,000 is enough in an ideal world... but that's not the situation we face. People are going out to get tested and some are being turned away, others get fed up with the wait and go home. Saying "just isolate" or "stop doing what you're doing" achieves nothing. Increasing capacity would catch more actual positive tests and help prevent spread.
