Dr. Pirzada, thank you so much for taking time to be here today and for your service in our community.
You might not realize this, but you've had an impact on me and my role as a vice-chair of this committee since I was appointed last fall. Since the pandemic started, I've always been of the opinion that in order to reduce the larger societal impacts of lockdown, we should be looking at ways to undertake more targeted isolation measures supported by rapid testing, so we can prevent the spread of COVID but also reduce the harm of domestic violence, suicide rates, mental health, surgeries being cancelled and all the stuff I'm sure you're seeing.
You wrote an article in the fall, talking about the need to have rapid test deployment, and here we are, six months later, on track to have well under 10% vaccinated by the end of March. Do you think it's time we had a federal strategy on rapid testing deployment?