Matt Gurney: COVID-19 testing isn’t enough to tell us what we need to know about this pandemic

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The real measure Canadians should be watching is the rate of hospitalizations. That will tell the tale. If demand soars, we’ll know we have a problem

Daily briefings on COVID-19 case counts and deaths from federal officials and the various provinces and territories are not giving Canadians the information they need. Statistics on the number of confirmed infections is no longer the most important metric for understanding this pandemic. Neither is the death toll . From here on out, the key number Canadians should be watching is how much remaining capacity there is in our hospitals, particularly our intense care units.

The second problem with testing is that it’s a lagging indicator. Even if you’ve been selected for a test, your results can take days to arrive . A patient may progress into an acute medical crisis, or shake off mild symptoms, before they hear back from a lab. The reason is simple. Whereas testing results are either in low supply, backlogged, or show a small, stable group of infected patients, but each day brought more ICU patients with COVID symptoms, always in greater numbers than the previous day, you’d know there was a problem. You wouldn’t need testing results to know what you were seeing — you’d want them, of course, to rule out other respiratory issues, but doctors would see the boom and know what it was.

But in any case, given the limited testing, the backlogs for results and the certainty that some infected Canadians have been missed, the real measure Canadians should be watching is the rate of hospitalizations. That will tell the tale. If demand soars, we’ll know we have a problem, and won’t need daily updates on testing tallies to know it. If positive tests soar but ICU usage remains low, that too will reveal much.

 

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