8 p.m. Hundreds of COVID-19 infections may be going undetected each week in Ontario because the province is regularly failing to use its full capacity to test for the disease, experts warn.
The problem is a weekly pattern that’s been clear since the spring: far fewer Ontarians are getting tested on the weekend.
This, in turn, has led to a weekly up-down testing cycle that may be making it harder to control what’s happening in Ontario’s second wave, says Dionne Aleman, a University of Toronto professor and CHE affiliate and an expert in pandemic modelling. If thousands fewer patients’ samples are being collected on the weekend, it suggests possibly infected people may be waiting to get tested, which leaves more time for them to expose other people, she said. “That’s a lot of secondary infections that have happened all because somebody didn’t want to come in on the weekend.”
Full article at: Toronto Star (October 28: Hamilton Spectator)