LAKELAND - St. Paul and Bonnyville have both been named as sites for the province's launch of rapid testing of COVID-19, with clinical pilots announced for both communities on Thursday.
In the coming weeks, two point-of-care rapid testing systems will be rolled out in clinical pilots at several sites throughout the province, according to the Government of Alberta. The PanBio rapid antigen tests will be used at one assessment centre in Calgary and one assessment centre in Edmonton, while the IDNow tests will begin to be used at the COVID-19 assessment centres in St. Paul and Slave Lake, and at the hospital lab in Bonnyville.
"The tests will be used on patients who are within the first seven days of expressing symptoms, allowing health officials to quickly identify positive cases at testing sites, reducing the need for patient samples to be transported to centralized public laboratories for processing," reads a provincial press release.
Over the last two months, Alberta Health Services (AHS) and Alberta Precision Laboratories (APL) have been working to evaluate the effectiveness of the Abbott IDNow and PanBio COVID-19 testing kits. Both kits have been approved by Health Canada and provided to provinces and territories by the federal government.
More than 100,000 tests are available for distribution to targeted sites to help reduce the spread of COVID-19, according to the provincial government.
Two swabs will be collected from each patient, and all negative tests from both systems will be subject to confirmation by the existing lab-based polymerase chain-reaction (PCR) testing method, to ensure validity.
"This is because a negative result is not as reliable as a PCR test and the test may miss some COVID-positive samples," according to the media release.
Alberta’s health officials will use the pilots to determine how to streamline processes before the tests are deployed across the province.
