Wow, People Really Have a Handle On This Coronavirus

Whoever tells you that Canada has this thing handled should be kicked:

Health Minister Patty Hajdu said today that Health Canada is not yet satisfied with any of the options it has been reviewing for rapid COVID-19 testing devices — and they will not be deployed across the country until regulators are sure they will meet a certain standard.

(Sidebar: this Patty Hajdu. Like a graphics designer would know what makes a good test.)

 

More:

All this starts to sound less coherent when checked against the reality public health experts are presenting. Hajdu makes it sound as though creating a usable quick test will be a herculean scientific task that could take years. Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina, who recently appeared on Malcolm Gladwell’s Solvable podcast, notes that not only does the technology for inexpensive paper-strip antigen testing already exist, we use it all the time. It is how doctors do in-clinic checks for strep throat and malaria without having to wait for results from a lab. Such tests take five minutes, require no instruments, and can be made in huge numbers. A Canadian company called Sona Nanotech has already designed one for COVID-19 that has achieved a sensitivity of 84.6 per cent (that is how often the test correctly generates a positive result for people who indeed have COVID-19) and a specificity of 90 per cent (which is how often the test correctly generates a negative result for people who don’t have COVID-19). As Mina and others have pointed out, such levels of accuracy may not be high enough for a doctor trying to diagnose someone who is ill, but they are more than high enough to serve as a useful screening tool to figure out if someone is transmitting (and therefore capable of spreading) the virus.

But what about the 15.4 per cent cases these rapid tests would miss? As Hajdu seems to see it, these people will be dancing mask-free in the streets, coughing celebratorily in strangers’ faces, because they think they do not have COVID-19 when they really do. It is the community chaos from which our health minister and Health Canada are currently protecting us by refusing to license rapid tests, even for emergency use.

Except that from a public health standpoint, these missed cases are irrelevant because — dancing mask-free or not — these people are not currently contagious. For the purposes of stopping the spread of COVID-19, it really does not matter whether someone has a low viral load (which a rapid test might miss at the end of the person’s illness, for example) or no viral load at all — in neither case can the person make someone else sick. And that is all that counts for decisions such as whether that person should go to school this morning, or see clients this afternoon, or attend a family reunion this evening. The only reason we’re not using rapid paper-strip COVID-19 antigen tests already is because North American regulatory bodies (the FDA and Health Canada) are holding the tests to the standards they use for medical diagnostics, rather than judging them on their merits as public health screening tools. If it sounds obvious, well, that is because it is. Which is why Malcolm Gladwell moaned to Michael Mina on the Solvable podcast, “How dumb is the FDA?” Maybe it was a rhetorical question, but the answer is “pretty dumb … yet not as dumb as Health Canada,” because at least the FDA has approved a couple of rapid antigen tests, even if they’re not the simplest, most scalable and least expensive ones that Mina is pushing. Health Canada will not even go that far, stubbornly waiting it out for a state of near perfection that is unnecessary for the tests to do their job.

 

Only in Canada can someone like Patty Hajdu (and Theresa Tam, for that matter), who is wholly unsuited for the job of health minister, be placed in a position of power and still keep it well after it has been proven time and time again how utterly incompetent and petty she is. 

Canada, a country that has the highest unemployment rate of any OECD country at 10.2%, a mortality rate (the real rate that people need to consider when comparing how countries match with their own) of 6.5% (as of this writing) and where one in four people could not make credit card payments because they were not working, has elected for another shutdown should the government claim there is a case for one:

Canadians would largely be supportive of another widespread shutdown if a second wave of the coronavirus occurred, new polling from Ipsos suggests.

In a survey conducted on behalf of Global News, Ipsos found that 75 per cent of respondents would approve of quickly shutting down non-essential businesses in that scenario, with 37 per cent strongly supporting the idea.

 

This country would not survive another shutdown.

Venezuela, here we come!