Paramedics in the Rainy River District have found themselves on the cutting edge of COVID-19 testing with a new pilot program.
The trial, said Rainy River District Paramedic Services deputy chief Chad Buist, began in December of 2020 and will help the province determine its long term COVID-19 strategy. The tests will also help to give local paramedics another tool to help keep COVID in check, which in turn keeps all of the people they may encounter during a shift even more safe.
“We can test people up to three times per week,” Buist said.
“It’s entirely voluntary for our staff, so the people that don’t want to do it won’t have to. If they do come up positive we send them to the hospital to get swabbed there and then they’re off work until those results come back.”
The point of the trial is to determine the accuracy of the Panbio rapid antigen detection test, a COVID-19 detector that can return a result in 15 minutes, though part of the trial is also determining its accuracy. Since the test is less accurate than lab-based tests, there is a possibility that a test could return a false negative from asymptomatic carriers, but determining how frequently that occurs will be part of the trial data.
“The accuracy on those tests as they keep going through these trials, they’re determining where it’s at,” Buist said.
“They thought it would originally be around 94.6 percent and since they’ve come down quite a bit, but it still does provide a lot of reassurance to staff to know that there’s a good probability they’re COVID negative if the tests come back that way.”
The tests themselves are done by way of a nasopharyngeal swab and detect specific proteins from the virus in order to determine if a further test is required.
Buist said there are 350 kits for the trial period, and once the kits have all been used and the data collected then their part in the trial is done. The hope then is that the data collected through this trial and others help to iron out any of the kinks in the test and better understand their benefit as a tool, though Buist said just having the quick result tests is already a good thing for the staff.
“We know they are fairly accurate and it certainly provides reassurance to our staff that we’re giving them a tool they can use if they have a symptom,” he said.
“And a lot of people are asymptomatic, so catching it that way is certainly handy.”
