A top Canadian doctor says Canada doesn’t need to require PCR tests for incoming travellers.
“What’s really clear is that COVID is everywhere and that it’s not travel that’s the major source of spread,” said Dr. David Carr, an emergency medicine professor in the Division of Emergency Medicine at the University of Toronto, told the CBC.
“Making people repeat their PCR [test] upon arrival is deflecting resources away from where they could be better spent,” he said.
“As we watch the loosening of other requirements, such as isolation periods, it would seem that loosening of requirements around travel should follow suit,” Beth Potter, president and CEO of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada (TIAC), told The Globe and Mail recently. “We would love to get to the point where you only need to do a rapid test on arrival, then carry on.”
“If we don’t and we continue to have a patchwork of heavy handed restrictions, travellers will simply avoid Canada and our industry will simply never recover,” Christopher Bloore, president and CEO of the Tourism Industry Association of Ontario, said in an email to jimbyerstravel.com.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson last week said Britain will no longer require re-departure tests for people travelling to Great Britain. The Guardian reports that Johnson said the Omicron variant of COVID-19 is now “so prevalent (that) these measures have a limited impact on the growth in cases while continuing to pose significant cost to our travel industry”.
The CBC said that recent Canadian government stats show that, of the more than 104,596 vaccinated travellers tested after entering Canada over the week of Dec. 19 to Dec. 25, just over two per cent tested positive. Of the more than 19,154 unvaccinated travellers tested that week, three per cent tested positive.
Carr told the network that rapid antigen tests, which are much cheaper and easier to arrange, would be much more effective.
“If we’re trying to make flying safer, I would rather fly in a plane of people who had a rapid test within the last 12 or 24 hours than a PCR in the last 72,” the doctor said.
