Public health officials in Montreal say they need more capacity to test for the coronavirus, as thousands of young adults respond to a citywide call to get checked out if they’ve been to a bar in the past month.
Public health officials in Montreal say they need more capacity to test for the coronavirus, as thousands of young adults respond to a citywide call to get checked out if they’ve been to a bar in the past month.
The call went out Saturday afternoon following reports of possible outbreaks at a handful of bars in the Montreal area.
On Tuesday morning, people lined up for as long as three hours outside the walk-in testing clinic in the old Hôtel-Dieu hospital, located in one of the city’s densest residential neighbourhoods.
Dr. David Kaiser, a physician with the public health authority for the island of Montreal, said testing has increased by 50 per cent since last week, especially among 20- to 39-year-olds. Around 3,000 people have been tested in the last two days in Montreal.
But with the increase in testing, officials are finding more cases.
The positivity rate in Montreal — that is, the number of cases found per total number of tests — had dropped below one per cent. It’s now around three per cent, Kaiser said, an increase of 10 to 15 cases per day.
While still much lower than the peak reached between late April and mid-May, the increase has prompted city officials to seek ways to boost testing capacity.
“These are cases that wouldn’t necessarily have been detected otherwise,” Kaiser said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon, noting that younger carriers of COVID-19 tend to experience fewer sympto