Air Canada helps spearhead private sector testing initiative for industry

[dagger]

Leadership by AC extends to helping Westjet and other competitors join the program

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/air-canada-suncor-and-other-companies-launch-rapid-screening-consortium-to-test-for-coronavirus

 

Air Canada, Suncor and other companies launch ‘rapid screening consortium’ to test for coronavirus

It raises the issue of why it took the private sector to implement what seems like a sensible way to hasten the return to normalcy

Author of the article:

Tom Blackwell

 

In another strange season of spectator-free NHL hockey, something exceptional has started happening at Toronto Maple Leafs games.

As they entered Scotiabank arena for the last few home meetings, non-playing Leafs employees have undergone rapid-antigen tests for COVID-19, receiving the results within about 15 minutes.

It’s the product not of a public-health agency edict, but an innovative new screening program launched largely independent of government, and built on surprising corporate co-operation.

With the help of University of Toronto business professors, 12 major Canadian corporations have banded together to develop a system for quickly screening workers — and hopefully speeding up the economy’s restart.

The “rapid-screening consortium” may be the only group of its sort in the Western world.

It was an idea partly inspired by novelist Margaret Atwood and involves a surprising commitment by the corporations involved. They have not only worked with each other over the last several months to put together the initiative, but pledged to share the system for free with other firms, including their competitors.

Air Canada has even agreed to work with rival airlines like WestJet to help them implement the screening program, says Ajay Agrawal, founder of the University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab and an overseer of the initiative.

“I have certainly never seen it before,” the Rotman School of Management professor said Sunday of the cross-industry linking of hands.

“Our economy is crushed,” said Agrawal. “By taking off their Air Canada badge and their Suncor badge and their Rogers badge … they took on a sense of national urgency, and they saw how much help they were giving each other.”

The goal is for the rapid-screening initiative to spread throughout the business world, even to small companies that might never have thought they could dabble in virus testing.

It’s being helped along by a blue-chip crew of advisers that includes two retired generals, Canada’s Chuck Lamarre and a former commander of Britain’s joint forces command.

Joshua Gans, another Rotman professor and the Creative Destruction Lab’s chief economist, says the concept flows from the issues he outlined in a book he had published months ago, The Pandemic Information Gap. Shuttering much of the economy, he concluded, was a result of having too little data, and being forced to treat everyone as potentially infected.

“We didn’t have to have all these lockdowns and restrictions if could just work out who amongst the population was infectious and isolate them,” he said. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to come up with that idea, that’s for sure, but it was not really appreciated at all.”

COVID-19 testing has focused to date on people with symptoms or who were in close contact with infected individuals. And it has used the gold-standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, which look for the virus’s genetic material. They are considered the most accurate, but can take a full day or longer to process in busy labs.

Rapid tests generally seek out antigens, pieces of the virus that trigger the immune system. They are not as precise, but require less expertise for swabbing and produce results on the spot in as little as a quarter hour.

The federal government has purchased 38 million rapid-antigen tests and started distributing them to provinces, but they do not appear to be in wide use yet.

A growing number of experts, though, are calling for them to be used to screen asymptomatic Canadians and get a better handle on where the virus is spreading — accuracy limitations notwithstanding.

The Creative Destruction Lab was founded in 2012, a non-profit whose goal is to harness the expertise of established businesses to help startups as they try to commercialize scientific innovation.

The goal was to help create equity in those firms of $100 million within five years, says Agrawal. In just eight years, the mentored companies’ worth has actually swelled to $8 billion, he said. The lab has expanded now to eight other universities in Canada and elsewhere, including Oxford.

The lab turned its attention to COVID-19 earlier this year and eventually set up what it called the “vision council,” hoping to identify the pandemic-related issues in greatest need of innovative solutions. The council consisted of a who’s who of Canadian and international corporate CEOs, including the president of China’s Alibaba — the world’s largest online retailer — the global head of McKinsey consultants, and Loblaw’s Galen Weston. Also among them was Mark Carney, former head of Canadian and U.K. central banks, and Michael Sabia, now the federal deputy minister of finance.

But there were also some more surprising big thinkers, including Atwood, British novelist and game writer Naomi Alderman and opera singer Measha Brueggergosman.

The council eventually settled on the need to test more widely, to better identify the small minority of people who have COVID-19 in the hope of opening businesses sooner.

Atwood asked why there couldn’t be something for COVID as convenient as a pregnancy test, recalls Gans.

Soon enough, the lab was tasked with starting a program and Agrawal managed to recruit 12 diverse companies to develop a pilot system: Air Canada, Rogers, Scotiabank, MLSE, Magna, CPP Investments, Genpact, Loblaw, MDA, Nutrien, Shoppers Drug Mart and Suncor.

Rogers, Air Canada, Suncor, MLSE and Air Canada recently launched the first pilot projects in Ontario and Alberta using tests provided by the provinces, with about 2,000 screens administered as of Sunday.

It all raises the issue of why it took the private sector — as opposed to government — to implement what seems like a sensible way to try to hasten the return to normalcy.

That’s a fair question, says Agrawal diplomatically, “but not one I can answer.”

“This is a national problem,” says U of T colleague Gans. “I would have liked national, provincial leadership on this … (But) what I’ve learnt is there are so many issues that in the midst of a crisis, it’s very, very hard to do them all.

[dagger]

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-air-canada-rogers-and-suncor-among-companies-piloting-covid-19-rapid/

 

Some of Canada’s top airlines, banks and sports teams have united to pilot rapid tests identifying COVID-19 in hopes that they can find a way to reopen workplaces.

The pilot is being run by the University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab, which has partnered with 12 companies including Air Canada 

 

Those behind the project believe it could give Canada’s corporate world a road map to quelling the spread of COVID-19 in workplaces that have had to close or have struggled to contain outbreaks.

“What we are trying to do is break the chain of transmission,” said Ajay Agrawal, the founder of the Creative Destruction Lab, a non-profit helping science and tech firms.

“We are using screening to stop one infected person from infecting other people in the workplace.”

Rogers Communications Inc. and Air Canada were the first two companies to begin the testing and in late January were joined by Suncor Energy Inc. and Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, Agrawal said.

Bank of Nova Scotia, Loblaw Companies Ltd., Shoppers Drug Mart, MDA Corp., Magna International Inc., Nutrien Ltd. and Canada Pension Plan Investments are expected to begin testing soon.

It wasn’t hard to get the companies on board, said Agrawal, because everyone is eager to reduce the spread of the virus and lift severe lockdown measures that have closed businesses across Canada and forced others into bankruptcy.

“I think they look across the country and all they see is carnage. Economic carnage,” said Agrawal.

His lab got executives from the companies together at the start of the pandemic when he realized that a “novel” health crisis would also need novel solutions.

They formed a “vision council” and convinced Mark Little from Suncor, Galen G. Weston of Loblaw and Shoppers Drug Mart and Don Walker from Magna to join.

Former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney and author Margaret Atwood took part as “thought leaders.”

After presentations and poring over plenty of numbers, they decided to put up their money and time and agree to share data as they experiment with rapid testing.

Two retired military generals with experience in Afghanistan were called in, and they began rehearsing how to make the testing as efficient as possible.

They reduced the entire screening process from seven minutes per person to 90 seconds.

“They keep trying to chisel down the time and expense,” Agrawal said.

“For example they had a medical professional doing Step 1, 2 and 3 and they realized we don’t need a medical professional doing step two and that brings the cost down.”

The pilot tests workers twice a week and makes use of millions of rapid tests obtained by the federal government and dispersed across provinces, who were allowed to allocate them for businesses.

Those in the pilot who get tested are allowed to continue with their work. When the results arrive roughly 15 minutes later, anyone with a positive result is contacted immediately and asked to take a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test.

Agrawal considers the PCR tests the “gold standard” because they’re considered to be more accurate than rapid tests and are being used by most provincial COVID-19 assessment centers.

He expects the rapid tests will generate some false positives, but not many.

“So far, there’s only been a few cases and they’ve all been confirmed by the PCRs,” he said.

Once the kinks are all worked out, Agrawal hopes to scale the system quickly, but he warns rapid antigen tests can’t work alone.

“They’re not going to solve (COVID) alone, but when we combine them with other things like PCRs and rolling out the vaccines, they’re just one piece of the puzzle, but a critical one.”

 

 

 

 

 

[dagger]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/world/americas/canada-coronavirus-rapid-test.html

[AIP]

This is a great initiative, and I hope it moves along quickly is incredibly successful.

My question then becomes, why hasn't the federal government in Canada, been involved or leading this ???

 

 

[J.O.]

I think governments have been reluctant to increase rapid testing initiatives because of issues with accuracy.

[rudder]

AC is paddling upstream against a health administration (Dr Tam) that wants zero international travel.

If you think that a corporate press release is going to change national health policy, prepare to be disappointed.

This government does not see the urgency that some employers see. One side is focused on health policy, and the other is focused on corporate health.

This far, there has not been any sign of a meeting of the minds on this (or any other) issue.

[dagger]

18 minutes ago, J.O. said:

I think governments have been reluctant to increase rapid testing initiatives because of issues with accuracy.

Quebec, for example, has used little of the stock the federal government has sent it, for that reason. But I expect the public sector will start using those more as part of a belt and suspenders approach to managing re-opening of certain facilities, institutions, etc.

[dagger]

10 minutes ago, rudder said:

AC is paddling upstream against a health administration (Dr Tam) that wants zero international travel.

If you think that a corporate press release is going to change national health policy, prepare to be disappointed.

This government does not see the urgency that some employers see. One side is focused on health policy, and the other is focused on corporate health.

This far, there has not been any sign of a meeting of the minds on this (or any other) issue.

I don't know why you single out government because if anything, Canada was a laggard for many months in strict border controls, and it only moved because of public fears about the new variants. So on this we are going to have to disagree. This testing program, as it grows, and expands to smaller businesses, will peak in a March-April timeframe as part of efforts for very gradually entering into safe-restart programs, which will be driven by the provinces.

[rudder]

6 minutes ago, dagger said:

I don't know why you single out government because if anything, Canada was a laggard for many months in strict border controls, and it only moved because of public fears about the new variants. So on this we are going to have to disagree. This testing program, as it grows, and expands to smaller businesses, will peak in a March-April timeframe as part of efforts for very gradually entering into safe-restart programs, which will be driven by the provinces.

There is a difference between support for safe return to work and freedom to move. One promotes commerce and the other relates to individual mobility beyond accessing basic necessities.

Current Federal and Provincial policy is essential travel only. I do not expect that policy to change prior to the fall, and likely protracted restrictions on international travel.

Perhaps there will be some buy in for this initiative from YOW. But I am not holding my breath.

I am only personally concerned with how this affects the airlines.