Dustin Gill hasn’t seen his seven-year-old daughter in a week. He’s self-isolating while he waits to get tested for COVID-19.
“It’s been pretty rough. I’ve never gone this long without seeing her,” Gill said.
After coming home from a trip to Cypress Hills, Gill started feeling congested, sluggish and short of breath.
Last Friday, he called the Healthline 811 to explain his symptoms and get a referral to be tested for coronavirus.
He said it took five days to get a call back from the test centre to book his appointment.
“Before that it was just kind of unknown,” Gill said.
“I didn’t know if I’d be waiting another one day or three days or five days or what it would be.”
The Saskatchewan NDP is hearing similar complaints of people waiting days to book a test, then days more for the results.
“It means you’re either having people out of work not earning money or being put in a place where they’re going to say, ‘I just can’t wait for this test. I’m going to have to go back to work,’ and be at a higher risk of spreading (COVID-19),” said NDP leader Ryan Meili.
The official opposition is questioning “why staffing levels and capacity have dropped” as the need for testing is rising.
“If we don’t get testing and tracing right the reopening of the economy, the reopening of schools is a recipe for this virus to get much, much worse.”
Meili is calling on the province to be more “transparent” about testing wait times. He wants the government to include the average wait time in daily briefings, similar to what Alberta does.
On Wednesday, Premier Scott Moe said it’s “unacceptable” for people to be waiting upwards of a week to get tested.
“We most certainly need to do better if that is the case and we will do better,” said Moe, adding federal funding will go toward increasing testing capacity.
According to Moe, as the province continues to resume health care services, it is trying to strike the right balance when it comes to staffing things like surgeries, long-term care homes and testing sites. In certain situations, that can lead to reduced hours at centres.
“Part of it is that you want to maximize the efficiency of testing sites,” said Dr. Saqib Shahab, the province’s chief medical health officer.
“Testing volumes had gone down to a level where some of the testing sites were staffed two or three days a week and that was fine maybe two or three weeks ago when all our numbers were low.”
Shahab said testing capacity ramped up in the southwest and west-central regions of the province, but there might be a need to increase testing in other areas, too.
“I think it is important as we enter into the fall, we do want to see high numbers of testing,” Shahab said.
“We will see more coughs and colds again in the fall, so we anticipated there will be more need to do testing because more people will have symptoms.”
Shahab recognized that the current backlog is a concern. He said there are ongoing discussions to figure out how to speed up the testing process.
Currently, certain people take priority when it comes COVID-19 testing, including health-care workers, people in hospital and people showing symptoms.
“Sometimes there needs to be some ability to wait for a bit especially if you’re asymptomatic it may take a day or two,” Shahab said.
“There is now attempts to streamline testing and speed up so you don’t have to wait too long to get tested.”