I'd like to thank our friends and colleagues from Slovakia for discussing their tremendous innovation and work.
I completely agree with the sentiment that you suggest and with the sentiment brought up by Ms. Michelle Rempel Garner earlier. These are excellent tests that have been underutilized in Canadian settings. We have access to them; we just haven't deployed them as broadly as we should have.
I think there is some general confusion among many Canadians as to the difference between a diagnostic test and a screening test. The PCR tests are very good for diagnostics. If you get sick and you want to know if a person coming into the hospital or clinic has COVID-19, you'd use a PCR test. We're talking about rapid testing to help keep workplaces safe. An example was given earlier: I'd much rather use a rapid test to detect most of the people coming in who are positive for COVID-19 by using these rapid tests than detect zero people coming in by not using any rapid tests. It's kind of a no-brainer, and they have been underutilized.
What's very interesting in Canada is that the business community figured this out first. While many of us in the medical and scientific community were debating back and forth, the business community just quietly went ahead and started integrating rapid testing, and created much safer work environments. This was most impressive. Here in Ontario, John Ruffolo is a well-known local business leader. He started pushing this forward, and we were applauding him from the sidelines.
I completely agree that we could utilize these tests much more significantly. There's room to do so. Quite frankly, this virus ain't going anywhere; it's going to be around for a while. Even with mass vaccine efforts in place, we still need to create safer workplaces. Given the way that point-of-care rapid testing was described by our Slovakian colleagues, it is a very smart way to do this.