OTTAWA They’re called rapid tests, but Manitoba appears in no hurry to use them.
At least 94 per cent of rapid tests Ottawa has sent to the province remain in a stockpile, while just 1.26 per cent of all rapid tests in Manitoba had actually been used as of this past Friday, according to new federal data, as well as provincial figures obtained Monday by the Free Press.
Manitoba is the only province that can’t seem to tell Ottawa how many of the federal tests it has distributed have actually been used.
Rapid tests are used to detect the coronavirus in as little as 15 minutes, but they’re nowhere near as sensitive as the regular PCR tests that are mostly done in large laboratories. They aren’t meant to definitively say whether someone has COVID-19; instead, they tend to detect people who don t yet have symptoms but carry high viral loads, which are often the ones who go on to infect multiple people.