The COVID-19 pandemic

[jamincan]

It seems to me by limiting testing to appointments only, the government is trying to obfuscate the actual backlog in testing. All centres in Waterloo Region, for example, only accept appointments for the same day and then stop accepting appointments once the limit is reached. How many people are trying to get tested, then? It's pretty much impossible to know with any certainty.

There are some datapoints, though. I checked Halton Region, and they are accepting appointments into the future, and right now the earliest available appointment is a week away (that may have become even greater since I last checked). That's pretty dire if true.

Appointments are better than waiting in line. Waiting in line is just a pointless waste of time. The one thing I will say for it is that the people who get tested are the ones who feel it’s important enough to wait in line, rather than the ones who click the button before everybody else does.

Either way, it’s clear a massive expansion of testing capacity is needed. It should be more or less on demand; and they should be tracking the extent to which people aren’t able to get tested.

I'm not disagreeing that appointment is better than waiting in line, but there is a side-effect to this, and I fear it will be at the expense of government accountability. You can't hold someone to account for a problem you don't know about.