Alberta starts COVID-19 rapid testing pilot
By Sean Feagan, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The Alberta government has started a pilot program to evaluate two COVID-19 rapid testing kits.
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.
The Abbott IDNow and PanBio COVID-19 Ag testing kits are both produced by Abbott Laboratories, an American multinational medical devices and health care company.
According to Tyler Shandro, Alberta’s Minister of Health, adding point-of-care rapid testing to the province’s COVID-19 testing capacity will allow for the identification and notification of positive COVID-19 cases in under 20 minutes.
IDNow, a “point-of-care” molecular testing device, was released in 2014 to detect influenza, streptococcus and respiratory syncytial virus. The company has modified the device to now allow for testing of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2).
PanBio is a smaller device that uses both nasal and nasopharyngeal sample collection. Instead of testing for the virus directly however, the version to be employed tests for two antibodies associated with COVID-19.
Patients who are within the first seven days of expressing symptoms will receive these tests. This will allow health officials to identify positive cases at testing sites, thereby reducing the need for patient samples to be transported to centralized laboratories for processing, according to a government press release.
Two swabs will be collected from each patient. All negative tests from both systems will be compared to results from the existing lab-based polymerase chain-reaction (PCR) testing method, which is less likely to produce false negatives (a test showing a negative result when the tested person has the virus).
These devices have the potential for use outside of traditional hospital settings, in addition to hospitals or laboratories. Therefore, they could be used at point-of-care locations, such as care centres or pharmacy clinics, to quickly screen patients, or at other locations, such as homeless shelters and long-term care facilities.