N.S. Chief Medical Officer Grounds Hopes For Rapid Testing At Airports
HALIFAX—Nova Scotia’s chief medical officer says he’s not interested in using rapid Covid-19 tests to ease travel restrictions within the Atlantic Bubble.
Dr. Robert Strang said Friday a strategy that tests every traveler entering the province for Covid-19 and uses negative results to limit quarantine time “is really not feasible or realistic.”
Strang made the comments after the local airline industry, including the Atlantic Canada Airport Association, made a public plea for looser travel restrictions.
Earlier this week, ACAA executive director Monette Pasher told Huddle that traffic at the region’s airports is down by about 90 percent and those travel restrictions “are the biggest impediment to losing our air service right now.”
She argued blanket testing every person who enters Atlantic Canada by air would help the governments better track Covid-19 cases in the region and would boost airport traffic by as much as 10-15 percent.
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However, Strang said today there are “a number of reasons” a blanket testing strategy won’t work.
He said people asking for that approach are “perhaps not understanding the limitation of the one-time, rapid testing that we have” in the province.
He said those tests “would not allow us to process the large numbers of people and give accurate enough results, so ultimately this type of testing wouldn’t allow us to remove the quarantine period.”
He said rapid testing is most appropriate when used on “very focused, targeted populations like rotational workers” where the results can be used to “modify” but not completely remove quarantine.
Pasher and others have also suggested Atlantic Canadian governments take a “modified” quarantine approach, similar to one being tested in Calgary, that doesn’t rely on rapid testing but uses negative test results from standard Covid-19 tests to cut quarantine periods short.
However, Strang’s comments Friday, combined with the fact that the Nova Scotia government has not yet indicated to airports that any similar testing programs are coming, suggest little interest for such a project.
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Strang also said today he’s feeling “less anxious” about a cluster of Covid-19 cases connected to a serious of public exposure announcements the government made earlier this month.
He said health officials haven’t identified any new cases connected to the cluster since Tuesday.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” he said, but things are looking better and there’s still no evidence the virus escaped the cluster and established community spread in the province.
Nova Scotia currently has 19 active cases of Covid-19, with two new cases identified Friday. One case was related to travel outside the province, while the other is still under investigation.
Trevor Nichols is a reporter for Huddle in Halifax. Send him an e-mail with your story suggestions: [email protected].