(04-23-2020, 07:51 PM)danbrotherston Wrote:(04-23-2020, 03:04 PM)taylortbb Wrote: I agree we're not in a position to open anything. But I think things should be moving in that direction, and I'm concerned they're not.
In any case, my 48 hour saga with public health wasn't about convincing them to test me. Every call started with them going down the testing criteria, and concluding that I met multiple criteria for priority testing, and that I should be tested. It was a crazy 48 hour wild goose chase going from public health telling me "you should be tested" to finally navigating the bureaucracy enough that I was in touch with someone who actually had the authority to authorize the test public health said I needed. Surely you agree that's not how it's supposed to work? We should be testing the people that meet the criteria, not giving them bureaucratic gauntlets to discourage it.
Why do you feel that they are not though? We've seen an increase in both the capacity for tests, as well as the number of tests done, and also a losening of chriteria for being tested. I understand that you had a bad experience, and clearly highlight a limitation in the testing system, but that is a single datapoint and does not show a trend--also perfect is the enemy of good, how frequent an issue is what you describe, I don't know, but at a certain point, there will be people who say "the system is broken because it didn't deal with my 1 in a million situation"....in public health, it's all statistics, individuals don't matter.
I don't think transmission between adjacent cities is a 1 in a million scenario, nor is not having a family doctor. Yet both seem to present substantial roadblocks to getting tested. You're right I don't have comprehensive data on the problem, but one rarely does. Ontario regulations that prohibit public health agencies from ordering tests seem pretty clearly to be needlessly bureaucratic, and I can't fathom what purpose they serve. Surely a public health nurse is qualified to assess that someone needs to be referred to an assessment centre? Once I did talk to a doctor all their assesment consisted of was running through the questions prepared by pubic health.