Quebec renounces PCR tests offered to all

Faced with an apprehended shortage, Quebec is giving up testing the general population using PCR tests, which will now be reserved for nursing staff and at risk. The government is relying on rapid tests, the difficult access to which has been denounced. As a result, the number of daily cases of COVID-19 will no longer reflect the extent of the spread of the disease in the province, a reality that worries experts.

Coralie Laplante
Press

By removing the possibility of performing PCR tests from the general population, it is now impossible to follow the evolution of the fifth wave of COVID-19 using the number of daily infections, says Benoit Barbeau, virologist and professor at the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM).

“At the moment, with the Omicron variant, the observation is that it is far too transmissible. We are not able to follow up, ”he maintains.

“What, exactly, is our data that allows us to determine what is going on in the community? The answer, currently, is that we do not have any ”, launches for his part the D^r Donald Vinh, infectious disease specialist and microbiologist at the McGill University Health Center (MUHC). “The tip of the iceberg that we see, it gets smaller,” he continues, noting that the reduction in PCR tests is added to the shortage of rapid tests and the fact that the analysis of water used to quantify community transmission has ceased.

“Overwhelmed” screening centers

“The companies told us about anticipated global supply problems with reagents for PCR tests,” said Marie-France Raynault, senior strategic medical advisor at the General Directorate of Public Health of the Ministry of Health and Social Services (MSSS), during a technical meeting for the media, Tuesday.

Currently, the province has the capacity to perform 30,000 PCR tests daily. “During the last week, for example, we carried out almost 60,000 tests per day, and it is unbearable”, underlined Marie-France Raynault. To avoid a shortage of equipment, these tests are no longer accessible to the general population.

Healthcare workers, people in hospital, homeless people, and Indigenous people traveling to a community will still be able to access a PCR test. People working in environments deemed to be high risk, such as slaughterhouses, will also be able to take this type of test.

Quebecers who do not fall into these categories are invited to take a quick test at home. If they do not have access to it, they should consider themselves a positive case if they have symptoms similar to COVID-19, and isolate themselves.

Quebec is not the only province to have limited access to PCR tests. This is also the case in Ontario, where this type of test is reserved for workers working in an environment deemed “at risk”, as well as certain people who are also at greater risk of contracting the virus.

“Lost control”?

According to Marie-France Raynault, the province has not “lost control” of the pandemic. “Already, for several weeks, the number of cases is not our main indicator. The positivity rate helps us, but we follow hospitalizations a lot, and particularly hospitalizations in intensive care, ”she underlined.

However, the positivity rate is biased, since it concerns only a partial sample of the population, explains Benoit Barbeau.

It is also not optimal to rely on the number of people in hospitals, according to D^r Vinh. “In terms of care planning in hospitals, we can’t do it when people show up at the door, we have to do it in advance,” he says.

Quebec is considering setting up a platform for self-reporting COVID-19 cases. This measure could be a good initiative, according to experts interviewed by Press, if the population is able to access a sufficient number of rapid tests.

Rapid test race

The federal government plans to send several million rapid tests to Quebec this week and an even larger quantity during the following weeks.

The Quebec Ministry of Health and Social Services maintains that deliveries would however have been interrupted during the holiday season, which Ottawa refutes. Quebec therefore ordered rapid tests directly from suppliers. A first shipment of 3 million tests is expected at the end of the day on Wednesday.

Benoit Morin, president of the Quebec Association of Owner Pharmacists (AQPP), said Tuesday that he did not have confirmation that the tests would arrive in Quebec on Wednesday. If all goes as planned, they can be distributed to pharmacies across the province as of Monday. “But I’ll wait and see them to believe it,” he said.

Pharmacies have not received rapid tests since last week, when Quebecers were already having difficulty accessing them.

Aurélie Wales-Gaudreau knows something about it. She went to her Montreal pharmacy in the morning on several occasions, failing to get rapid tests. “There were already posters in the windows saying they were out of stock,” she says.

However, she started showing symptoms related to COVID-19. Her sister, who had managed to get a box of tests, gave her one. But she had to make an appointment at a pharmacy for a nurse to assess her two children using a rapid test, at a cost of $ 40 per person.

Benoit Morin emphasizes, however, that the rapid tests that are used during these meetings are not the same as those distributed free to the population. These are tests that had been previously purchased by pharmacists.

With Mylène Crête, Press