Here’s how one Ontario manufacturer is using rapid COVID-19 testing to help keep its employees safe

Article Written By: Christine Sismondo – a Toronto-based writer and contributor to the Toronto Star.

Last fall, even though Barrie’s CanSave had been quite proactive in its implementation of COVID-19 safety protocols, the management team wondered if they had done enough.

CanSave, an independent manufacturing company founded in 1982 by brothers Larry and Cully Koza, was never shuttered since it’s considered an essential business that supplies the construction industry.

“This is our first pandemic,” jokes Dan McArthur, president of CanSave. “And so we were just trying to figure out how to navigate through this and keep our people as safe as possible. That was our No. 1 objective.”

The company invested in PPE, touch-free technology, repurposing space to make more rooms for lunches and breaks, remote home offices for the staff who could work at home and, perhaps most importantly, a physical distancing system from Safeteams, a Canadian company selling wearable technology that alerts people when they’re getting within six feet of another person. It also keeps track of those incidents, which makes it possible to do contact tracing in the event of a COVID-19 case.

“We understood that social distancing was going to be a key component in helping us minimize the risk of potential virus spread,” says Ralph Galle, who heads human resources. “We didn’t know how we were faring and needed something to give us this critical information.”

The next step in the company’s data-driven approach was COVID testing. There’s a confusing array of ways to implement that, however, including the type of test — antigen versus PCR versus antibody — for example. In addition, as Galle points out, it was important that the employees felt comfortable with all the protocols, including testing. To assuage everyone’s fears, keep up morale up and foster an environment where everyone would feel safe, the team knew they needed advice.

Fortunately, founder Larry Koza had a close friend who was something of an expert in the field, Dr. Michael Anderson, a researcher at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Even more fortunately, Anderson, also the chief medical officer at Verto Health, just happened to be involved in a pilot project focused on rapid testing in congregate settings.

“Actually, we talked to him almost every day since the beginning of the pandemic,” says Koza. “He was our coach through the whole thing, so we are very fortunate. And when we asked about testing, he said, ‘We’re starting a project with McMaster and we need a guinea pig. Would you guys be willing to be our guinea pig?’ And we jumped in with both feet.”

The project has a lot of partners and a lot of moving parts, so bear with us for a brief explainer. The McMaster he’s referring to is McMaster HealthLabs, a not-for-profit that, along with St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton, developed a robot-analyzed rapid PCR test that produces accurate results in 24 hours or less.

The test can also detect asymptomatic or presymptomatic cases without the use of the “brain-tickler” nasopharyngeal test. Instead, samples are taken from inside the mouth and a less-invasive swab of the nasal passage, a process that can actually be self-administered, albeit under the supervision of a virtual nurse who watches remotely. In the case of CanSave’s workplace testing, people can swab themselves in front of an iPad while nurses from Bayshore HealthCare watch on their screens.

Samples are then couriered from Barrie to Hamilton, where the robots at St. Joseph’s Healthcare take over. Verto Health seamlessly connects all the different partners and deals with the data, ensuring that everything is handled and stored properly. And, if a positive result comes up, the health pros at these institutions help the company understand the data and figure out what to do next.

“Giving a business in an industry that has no health care experience straight information isn’t very helpful,” says Anderson. “If they have two positives, they don’t know if it’s community spread or if it came on internally, so I can’t express enough the value of being able to bring in the expertise of McMaster Health Labs and infectious disease doctors.”

He continues: “Testing disconnected from an ability to add context to the information isn’t quite as valuable as you think.”

In fact, CanSave did have two asymptomatic positives in the third wave. Between the contact tracing of the wearable tech and the advice from experts at McMaster, they knew how to proceed. When they established that the two asymptomatic cases hadn’t led to any new cases at CanSave, they also knew their safety protocols were working.

Pretty great, right? Wait, it gets better. The money spent by clients like CanSave (there are now quite a few companies using this testing service, including some film and television productions) is used to subsidize tests administered by McMaster HealthLabs and St. Joe’s to populations in Hamilton that can’t afford it, such as people experiencing homelessness.

“This was our whole reason for being,” explains Jack Gauldie, vice-president of research at St. Joseph’s Health System. “Our vision really was accessible and equitable diagnostic testing surveillance for all populations. So anything that we can put aside after the cost of running those diagnostics for businesses is applied to the organizations without the resources to get it done.”

As cases wind down and we dare to hope for things to open up in late summer and fall, this type of rapid, relatively easy to administer surveillance system will likely be in big demand for businesses and schools that want to safely reopen. Even if we achieve the dream of a post-COVID-19 world, its inventors emphasize the importance of continuing to invest in this research.

“We didn’t have the infrastructure and, for all intents and purposes, you could make the same argument for our vaccine approach. We used to have the infrastructure in Canada,” says Gauldie, referring to the privatization and sale of Connaught Laboratories, which made tetanus, polio and smallpox vaccines in the 20th century. “So we’re behind and waiting for others to produce the material before we could get access to it, but now we’re reinvesting in this infrastructure and we’re now at the forefront in diagnosis.”

Imagine if we’d had this ready to go before the pandemic and simply had to tweak it for the specific pathogen. Gauldie says that’s a reality.

“Ontario stepped up and I think we have a much better capacity for responding in the future,” says Gauldie. “And that’s critical.”