World is ‘blind’ to COVID spread, WHO warns. Where does Canada stand?

World Health Organization on Tuesday urged countries to maintain surveillance of coronavirus infections, saying the world was “blind” to how the virus is spreading because of falling testing rates.“As many countries reduce testing, WHO is receiving less and less information about transmission and sequencing,” Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference at the U.N.

agency’s headquarters in Geneva.“This makes us increasingly blind to patterns of transmission and evolution.” Canada lacks robust COVID-19 detection system amid 6th wave.

Here’s why Bill Rodriguez, chief executive of FIND, a global aid group working with WHO on expanding access to testing, said “testing rates have plummeted by 70 to 90 per cent.”“We have an unprecedented ability to know what is happening.And yet today, because testing has been the first casualty of a global decision to let down our guard, we are becoming blind to what is happening with this virus,” he said.Experts say Canada needs to develop a robust system to detect COVID-19 activity in the absence of wide-scale PCR testing, which has ultimately led to inaccurate official case counts.Since the Omicron variant took hold over the winter, provinces and territories have scaled back access to gold-standard PCR testing, citing the lack of capacity to keep up with demand and the need to free up health-care resources.Many people have since relied on results from rapid antigen tests, but they aren’t as reliable at detecting the Omicron variant or reported and tracked the way PCR tests are.Experts say there needs to be a better way of informing people about COVID-19 activity in their communities.