THUNDER BAY – Public Health Ontario may be stepping in to help health-care officials process COVID-19 tests locally. 

Dr. Stewart Kennedy, COVID-19 incident manager at the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre, on Friday said while the move was not yet confirmed, PHO had been working on plans to establish a testing laboratory in the city.

Testing limitations have posed a major challenge for Thunder Bay-area health authorities scrambling to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Kennedy for weeks has been calling for a local lab-testing facility, which would drastically cut turnaround times for local tests. 

Tests are currently sent to Toronto, with a typical wait time of two to six days for results. That lag has kept dozens of hospital staff off work for days at a time, as they await results for potential cases with whom they’ve come in contact.

The lab would have capacity to process up to 200 tests per day, he said, and return results within two to six hours. The facility wouldn’t require test kits to process results, unlike a testing unit set up at the hospital. That technical limitation has frustrated hospital officials, who have had the unit on hand for over a week, but only received an initial shipment of 60 test kits Thursday, and aren’t certain when more will arrive.

In the meantime, the hospital is rationing the test kits, which can be processed in-house and return results within hours, for high-priority cases, largely amongst health care workers and hospital patients. Kennedy expected the supply to last only about a week, even with those restrictions.

Kennedy, who is also the hospital’s executive vice-president, said the PHO lab would alleviate concerns over local testing capacity and wait times.

“Public Health Ontario wants to set up a lab here in Thunder Bay, bring up a whole module to public health here, where we wouldn’t need test kits, we could do the extraction of RNA from the viral particle, like they do at the lab in Toronto,” Kennedy said. “I’m hoping we’ll be getting that module up here in the very near future.”