Doug Ford orders Ontario health officials to ramp up COVID-19 testing

Yorkregion.com
April 9, 2020
Rob Ferguson

A “frustrated” Premier Doug Ford has sounded off on Ontario’s relative lack of testing for COVID-19 --using just a quarter of the system’s lab capacity --and ordered health officials to do better.

“My patience has worn thin,” Ford said Wednesday, calling the failure to take advantage of the province’s full testing capacity “absolutely unacceptable.”

The province can now test 13,000 samples daily and health experts have been calling for more testing to get a more accurate sense of how and where the virus is spreading, including in prisons and homeless shelters along with health-care institutions.

In recent days, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health Dr. David Williams has said officials are coming up with a new testing strategy and have balked at testing all people in nursing homes, for example.

His associate medical officer Dr. Barbara Yaffe acknowledged Tuesday the “need to get more people tested” but cautioned against indiscriminate testing that could lead to “another backlog” in the labs.

Ford said he wants more testing in long-term care facilities for residents and workers, more front-line health-care workers and first responders such as police officers, firefighters and paramedics.

“The more people you test, the better the numbers are going to be” in terms of informing health-care officials of the extent of the new coronavirus, Ford told reporters.

“I’m going to be on this like a dog on a bone,” he added, citing countries like South Korea that have done extensive testing.

On a per-capita basis Ontario is testing at a lower rate than several other provinces.