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COVID-19 testing is a crucial part of tracking and managing the pandemic. It has become a part of daily life that's often necessary for returning to work or school or for keeping friends and family safe.
But it also generates a lot of confusing news and advice from case counts to wait times to ever-changing instructions about who needs to get tested, when, how and why.
It's no wonder CBC readers have lots of questions. We checked with experts to get some of the answers.
Is the present spike in COVID-19 cases in Canada related to the increase in testing?
Many provinces have been breaking daily new case records for COVID-19, including British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. But these provinces are all running more tests now than they were at the previous peak in the spring when a shortage of tests meant even people with very typical COVID-19 symptoms couldn't get tested. So, are the increased case counts simply due to more testing? For the most part, no. But the amount of testing does make a difference.
For Ontario, the new records are partly due to the increase in testing, said Dr. Sumon Chakrabarti, an infectious disease specialist with Trillium Health Partners in Mississauga, Ont., in an interview with CBC News Network.
Ontario completed over 48,000 tests on Oct. 7 (two days before setting a record of 949 cases in one day) — about quadruple the 12,000 it ran on April 24 when the province hit a spring peak of 640 cases.
At that time, Chakrabarti estimates about three-quarters of cases were being missed, and there were likely closer to 2,500 cases a day in late April.
However, the real number of cases in Canada is definitely higher than it's been since the spring peak.
All things being equal, if you test more of the population, you will end up testing more people with COVID-19, which will cause the case counts to go up, but you will typically test even more people without COVID-19, causing the percentage of positive tests to decrease, said Cynthia Carr, founder of the Winnipeg-based epidemiology consulting firm EPI Research Inc.
But in fact, the percentage of tests that come back positive is increasing in many places, including Manitoba. In that province, the real number of cases is "definitely an increase relative to the spring." ...
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