The swab shortage
One of the weakest links in the testing chain is the simple nasopharyngeal swab.
The swabs are inserted into a patient's nose and then sealed into a tube with a transport growth medium that keeps the virus alive until it can get to the lab.
Around the world, countries are desperately looking for the swabs. Even
Iceland is running low.
As a result of the shortage, Public Health Ontario
has approved the use of swabs normally used to test for other pathogens, including chlamydia.
How did the global pandemic response to COVID-19 risk being derailed by a swab on a stick?
Most hospitals keep a short-term supply, a form of "just-in-time delivery" common to the broader marketplace, where supplies are delivered as they are needed.
It works in normal, non-pandemic situations, but now, Canada is competing with the rest of the world to buy everything from swabs to masks to testing kits — including the U.S., where many of these products are made.
Another weak link in the testing chain are the chemicals needed to put the patient's sample through a PCR machine to isolate bits of the virus and determine if the patient is infected.
"The supply chain for the clinical labs for actual tests is getting to be very constrained, to the point where we're probably literally days away from running out of key components," said Jim Woodgett, director of research at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute.
RIght now, most provincial labs are running at full capacity, with each PCR machine able to do about 96 tests every three to four hours. That's not fast enough.
Growing backlog
In Ontario, the backlog of tests is growing every day. The CBC's Mike Crawley
reported on Tuesday that Ontario testing centres are sending about 3,000 tests per day to the labs. Yet those labs are only able to produce about 2,000 test results per day.
Right now, Ontario has more than 10,000 people waiting for results.
"We all would want more tests," said Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada's chief medical officer, at a media briefing on Tuesday. "One has to recognize there's some flexibility that has to be provided depending on the circumstances, but we all want to up our capacity."
