You may or may not recall, but when the task force was launched in April 2020 there wasn't a single approved immunoassay at that time. The first approvals took place in May. Those were approvals for assays that required a formal blood draw from a vein. We got those into the studies as quickly as we could.
The issue of looking at how to accelerate approval and the assessment of the efficacy of immunoassays is important to do. This is not specific to Canada. In virtually every country the standards for doing this, which involve assembling panels with diverse sources of blood, not only from infected people but from people infected with other conditions, and the period over which one looks at those bloods, meaning not only when they are first infected, but seven, 14, 21, 28 days later that whole process, in my opinion, based on our experience, could benefit enormously from stronger standardization, discipline and coordination with respect to making it work much more efficiently.
We did not have any point-of-care assays approved by Health Canada. Those are assays that can be used with a drop of blood from the finger. These assays can be used at home, so this allows you to test populations in a much easier way than to have people come and have a formal draw of blood with a needle. We worked very hard for a national microbiology laboratory to get an assessment of the validation of the dried blood spot. This we achieved in September. But this, again, is an area where I think if we looked at the process of getting the accreditation or the authorization that this was a valid and useful test.... I'm sure there's room for improvement.
The short answer is, yes, I think there's room for improvement in getting our testing assessed for accuracy more quickly.