Rapid testing for COVID-19 is being expanded across Alberta to reach more people in homeless shelters, long-term care facilities, and remote rural communities.
Health Minister Tyler Shandro says that starting tomorrow, December 18, rapid point-of-care testing will begin at long-term care and designated supportive living facilities in the Edmonton Zone using dedicated mobile testing centres.
Mobile testing centres are expected to be ready to deploy in the Calgary Zone starting the week of December 21. Mobile testing centres will be focused first on outbreak sites.
Expansion to long-term care and designated supportive living facilities outside Edmonton and Calgary zones is expected to follow shortly after.
Further expansion also includes the addition of rapid point-of-care testing at 25 rural hospitals in the Alberta Health Services North, Central, and South Zones through the rest of December and early January, enhancing the testing system in more remote rural communities that currently require all patient samples to be transported to centralized public laboratories for analysis.
Rural hospital sites include acute care hospitals in Cardston, Pincher Creek, Brooks, Oyen, Wetaskiwin, Drayton Valley, Drumheller, Rocky Mountain House, Castor, Coronation, Wabasca, Edson, Cold Lake, St. Paul, Elk Point, Peace River, Westlock, Barrhead, Provost, Lac La Biche, Camrose, Wainwright, Hinton, Two Hills, and Vegreville.
The expansion of rapid testing systems to new locations across the province will provide faster and more convenient testing, helping to identify and isolate positive cases more rapidly than previously possible.
Expansion of the rapid-testing clinical pilot began during the week of December 7 with the deployment of systems at the first non-Alberta Health Services sites – Calgary’s Drop-In Centre and Edmonton’s isolation facility – where staff nurses have been trained to use the systems with homeless shelter clients who are difficult to reach through the existing COVID-19 testing program. Work is underway to bring the systems to more homeless shelters in urban and rural locations in the coming weeks.
More than 1,000 people have received the rapid tests at assessment centres and hospital locations to date, including 76 positive cases who were notified about their result in a matter of hours.
“Alberta’s COVID-19 testing program is critical to managing and preventing the spread of the virus in our communities,” said Minister Shandro. “Bringing rapid point-of-care testing directly to the locations where it can help protect the health of the most vulnerable Albertans is an important addition to our provincial testing system.”
Alberta Health Services has received more than 800,000 rapid tests from the Public Health Agency of Canada.
