company running mandatory COVID-19 testing for people arriving in Canada is gearing up for an increase in travel.
Whether that’s coming this summer, next fall or next year, it doesn’t know.
But in an exclusive interview with the Star, the executive team at Switch Health expressed little doubt that testing will remain part of the travel landscape until the day that COVID-19 goes away.
Frustrations that Canada wasn’t prepared when the federal government implemented mandatory testing for incoming travellers in February has led to a lot of scrutiny of the Toronto-based company.
Switch Health was hired this year by the Public Health Agency of Canada to provide test kits to those crossing by land, perform arrival tests for people landing at Pearson, and manage tests for travellers waiting out their quarantines at home.
As of the end of April, more than 180 formal complaints about Switch Health had been registered with PHAC.
Two members of Switch’s team are expected to face a grilling at a House of Commons committee hearing later this week, after MPs have repeatedly raised concerns around whether the testing regime is robust enough to slow the importation of COVID-19 cases, particularly if border restrictions are loosened in the coming months.
Switch insists it is ready — and very mindful how much travellers are counting on it.
“It’s not fun being quarantined,” CEO Dilian Stoyanov said in an interview. “Every day feels like 10, and so we want to make sure that people are out in time.”
While the company doesn’t dismiss the complaints it has received, it puts them in the context of having processed upwards of 600,000 tests.
Since mandatory testing went into effect in February, Switch has scaled up its operations, going from a staff of several dozen to a payroll of more than 2,000 full-time, part-time and contract positions.
Wait times for a nurse to supervise a COVID-19 test have dropped from over an hour to just 16 minutes, a decline Switch attributes to pre-booking appointments and expanding the number of supervisors.
Data provided to the House of Commons shows that in the first two months of operations, about 17 per cent of test results weren’t delivered by the end of a person’s 14-day mandatory quarantine.
A late-April policy change to require a second test on day eight, and not day 10, has now meant that nearly all the test results are back in time.
Another issue the company confronted in the early months of the program was how to coordinate pickups of at-home tests. Initially, there was limited pickup capability on weekends, leading to bottlenecks. Then there were the unique realities of Canadian geography.
It’s one thing for a traveller quarantining in Toronto to schedule a pickup for their athome test. It’s another thing entirely for someone living in a remote outpost in the Yukon, or off the coast of British Columbia.
The company has partnerships with Purolator and Uber, as well as local delivery agencies in more remote locations. It has now set up Saturday pickups and is working on Sunday pickups as well.
But all this has happened with travel at just a fraction of what it was pre-pandemic. Since Jan. 1, about 3.9 million people have arrived in Canada by land or air, compared with 94 million people during the same period of 2019.
Those entering the country now are subject to testing and quarantine and must be either Canadian citizens or permanent residents; if they’re not, they must be from a list of approved exceptions, including agricultural labour, certain international students, or people coming to work on COVID-19 response.
Stoyanov said the company is putting in place the required capacity for when travel numbers start to increase, because they will, and that work is being done in part by using previous travel data and migration patterns to estimate what that travel will look like.