Manitobans in favour of at-home rapid tests for children: poll

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This article was published 01/11/2021 (1766 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitobans overwhelmingly want parents to be able to screen their children for COVID-19 using rapid tests, but the province won’t say whether it’s ever considered such a move.

New polling data has the Manitoba Liberals calling on the province to make rapid testing available for families to use at home.

Probe Research asked 1,189 Manitobans a series of questions about COVID-19 last month. One of the most unifying opinions it found was about doling out rapid tests to parents.

A total of 80 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement “Manitoba parents should be provided with free rapid antigen at-home test kits for their children who may be experiencing COVID-19 symptoms so they can know if it’s OK to send them to school.”

Among the respondents, 43 per cent strongly agreed with the idea.

Rapid tests are less accurate than molecular PCR tests done by labs, which are best used for people with symptoms.

Antigen tests detect people with high loads of the novel coronavirus who don’t even know they’re sick, which are often the most likely people to spread COVID-19. Yet, these tests can produce false negatives in people with low viral loads in their nasal passages.

The Free Press asked Manitoba Health if it had ever considered doling out rapid test to parents; the department didn’t answer the question.

Instead, a statement pointed to a checklist issued in June, to help parents decide whether a child’s symptoms means they should stay home.

“We know that parents want to be safe, and ensure their children don’t go to school if they are sick (whatever the cause),” wrote a spokesperson. “The best way to keep children safe from COVID-19 is to get them vaccinated, if they are eligible.”

But that’s the whole point of using rapid tests, Manitoba Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont argued.

He noted children make up the larger demographic of cases reported in the past week, including age groups too young to be vaccinated.

“What really matters is they’re readily available to parents,” Lamont said in an interview. “They need to be readily available and they need to be free.”

The NDP noted recent concerns about expiring rapid test kits in Manitoba, saying it was a sign the PC government should put them to use.

“Giving those rapid tests to parents so they can have peace of mind and guidance seems like an easy, simple step,” wrote NDP health critic Uzoma Asagwara. “Why wouldn’t the PCs use every tool they have to help families and kids stay safe?”

Austria and other European countries have been using routine rapid tests on children for a year, to help contain outbreaks in schools.

Ontario rolled out a similar program a month ago, however, only for areas with high risk of COVID-19 transmission. Otherwise, officials argued rapid tests would produce too many false results, sending children out of school and their family to testing centres.

Meanwhile, Probe also asked if businesses with employees working in close contact should be required to routinely take rapid tests, even when vaccinated. Just 52 per cent of respondents agreed with that idea.

Manitoba’s strategy for rapid tests is to deploy them to almost any business that wants them, as well as public institutions that have unvaccinated employees required to undergo regular rapid testing.

As of Oct. 12, Manitoba had shipped out 1,130,700 of the 1,679,283 kits it has received from Ottawa or bought on its own, amounting to 67 per cent of those tests leaving the warehouse.

In September, Manitoba became the sole province to stop tracking how many COVID-19 rapid tests it has used, after persistently low uptake numbers. In previous months, fewer than one-fifth of deployed tests had actually been used.

The province argues it knows tests have been used when a company or department requests more of them.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca

Probe question Oct 2021 on parents using COVID-19 antigen tests