It's time to get rid of Canada's ridiculous PCR test requirement
I’m pleased to be writing this missive from Canadian soil after narrowly avoiding a couple of weeks in an Austrian gulag due to a false positive COVID test.
Like all other inbound travellers, my wife and I needed to each take a molecular COVID test to return home to Canada after a short trip to Europe (the odd pairing of Malta and Vienna, for those curious). Without a negative test, you can’t board a plane to Canada. If you make it to a land border without one, you’ll be fined $5,000.
Rather than spend a day on vacation hunting down a PCR test, before we left my wife and I ordered to bring with us a couple of do-it-yourself RT-LAMP kits from Air Canada and Switch Health, at a cost of $150 each.
Switch Health is the company that didn’t exist a couple of years ago but now has managed to secure a monopoly on arrival testing at Canadian borders and airports, and also sells what I think is the only DIY test that Canadian border officials will accept.
(Curiously, Air Canada’s former CEO has now joined Switch Health as an advisor and major investor, so take from that what you will).
We dutifully sat in our hotel room on a video call with some Switch Health employee to supervise that we were shoving our swabs far enough up our noses and not monkeying around with the identity-verifying QR codes on the testing devices. After the call ended, the machines needed about 30 minutes to run before showing a result light.
Mine came back positive; my wife got a negative.
We had been inseparable throughout the trip and in the days leading up to it and neither of us had any COVID symptoms. Both of us are fully vaccinated. The tests were supposed to be just a formality.
Nevertheless, not being able to provide a negative test, despite showing no evidence of having COVID, would have stranded me abroad and jeopardized my wife’s return as a close contact.
She was able to secure some rapid tests from the pharmacy across the street from our hotel. I did two of them, about 10 hours apart. Both were negative. I then went to find a lab-based PCR test, which also came back negative. I was fortunate to be in Vienna, in which COVID testing kiosks are rarely more than 500 metres apart – more ubiquitous than Weiner Würstelstands (which I’d rather have been spending the day visiting).
With no symptoms and three negative tests, I was confident my initial result was a false positive, so I salvaged what was left of the trip before my return home.
As the world reopens, the Canadian pre-entry test remains one of the most costly, ineffective, and distressing features of Canada’s pandemic response.
The United States will admit you with a rapid test. Malta will let you in if you’re vaccinated. Austria will accept proof of vaccination, a negative test, or a previous positive test to confirm natural immunity (though no one checked when we arrived).
More and more countries, such as France, Switzerland, and Germany, have no testing requirement for vaccinated travellers.
In Canada, however, the government is refusing to budge on mandatory PCR testing.
The PCR requirement is sure to prove nightmarish with the United States land border finally reopened as of this morning. A quick jaunt across to Washington or Michigan to hit up Olive Garden and Target will require a negative test to return.
The Canadian government’s concession was that it would accept a test taken in Canada before departure, provided it was less than 72 hours ago. Not that I’m encouraging the government to restrict things further, but if you can travel to another country and back using a test taken before the trip, the test clearly isn’t about travel risk.
Pre-arrival COVID testing isn’t about reducing infection, just making travel so cumbersome and costly that no one can do it.
Some of these molecular tests can run $250 USD per person, especially ones which guarantee results within the 72-hour window.
There are going to be numerous issues of people arriving without the necessary testing and getting turned away or fined, not to mention people thinking it’s just not worth the hassle, which defeats the purpose of the supposed ‘reopening.’ To be clear, Canada is the problem here, not the United States.
On one hand, we’re told vaccines are the key to getting out of the pandemic, but the vaccine isn’t enough to drop other entry requirements.
Everyone boarding a plane in Canada is now vaccinated, but they still have to wear masks.
Even if I did have COVID, if I had no symptoms and hadn’t even given it to my wife, what risk would I be posing to other vaccinated people on an airplane, where air turns over every few minutes.
The pre-arrival test is another reminder of government policy that is focused not on science, but just on seeing what sticks.
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