Canada’s chief public health officer gave some clarification regarding COVID-19 testing in Canada.
Dr. Theresa Tam, says when talking about current lab capacity, it’s about building up the ability to determine a surge in cases when public health measures are relaxed.
“Specifically a robust testing capacity is a vital component of our case finding, contact tracing, isolation and quarantine approach to rapidly corner the virus,” she said.
Tam says we know we’re testing enough by the percentage of tests that come back positive.
“The lower the percentage of positive tests, the better your surveillance is. When the positive tests are really high, you’re missing a lot of infections.”
There have been over 1,032,000 people tested in Canada so far, with 65,399 confirmed cases of COVID-19, or 6 per cent testing positive.
Tam said the World Health Organization benchmark is to aim for a percentage positive rate of 10 per cent or below.
“Canada has maintained a percentage positive rate below ten per cent throughout the epidemic. Most encouragingly our average weekly percent positive rate has been declining from 9.8 per cent in early April to about 4 per cent in early May.”
There have been 4,471 deaths from COVID-19 and 45 per cent of COVID-19 cases have recovered.
