So there's waffling about letting anybody else but the existing (overloaded) public labs to COVID-19 testing

Which I found out via twitter, I wrote my MP.

From: Graydon
To: Raj.Saini@parl.gc.ca
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: increasing COVID-19 test capacity
Reply-To: graydonish@gmail.com

Hello!

So I'm one of your constituents and I can do a little bit of math.

It is critically important that we ramp up COVID-19 testing capacity as fast as possible.  Not "as fast as could be done in regular circumstances", but as fast as we can do it.  It is past time to recognize the depth and severity of the emergency we face.

That means finding a way to have research labs support and supplement the existing public testing labs by running tests immediately, not after a lengthy accreditation process.  This means relaxing regulations; this means taking a small risk of tests not being run properly to avoid the certain overload of our health care system.  I have no doubt that standard tests already developed in public health labs can be run by highly skilled technicians from research labs under the full supervision of the public health labs, without requiring that research lab techs go through the normal accreditation process.  Perfect in six weeks is useless; it has to be in place and running now.

Last month would have been a lot better.  It was entirely obvious last month from what was happening in Korea and Taiwan what an effective response would look like.  Canada hasn't done this and it's going to hurt us badly and you, sir, are among those personally responsible for this lapse.

It means going abroad for low-cost, quick-response kits such as those being developed by Institut Pasteur, paying the licensing fees, and getting domestic production ramped up like there was a war on.  Canada lost under a percent of the then-total population in the Great War; we're looking at losing much more than that in one year if the health care system goes down.  This situation is much worse than a war.

So far, the Canadian public response has been marked by vacillation and incompetence from our elected leaders; there's been far, far too much waffling and far, far too much worry about the markets, rather than how to keep absolutely everybody housed and fed for the year or two before we can put an economy back together.  An economy with much more primary manufacturing and no fossil carbon extraction, because if we have the means to keep everybody alive we can totally decarbonize while we're about rebuilding things in a more robust form than the current capital-optimizing long supply chains.  That'll keep everybody alive for much longer than a year or two.

Vehemently,

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