World is ‘blind’ to COVID spread, WHO warns. Where does Canada stand?

The head of the WHO is urging countries to maintain surveillance of COVID infections, saying the world was "blind" to how the virus is spreading because of falling testing rates.

The head of the World Health Organization on Tuesday urged countries to maintain surveillance of coronavirus infections, saying the world was “blind” to how the virus is spreading because of falling testing rates.

“As many countries reduce testing, WHO is receiving less and less information about transmission and sequencing,” Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference at the U.N. agency’s headquarters in Geneva.

“This makes us increasingly blind to patterns of transmission and evolution.”

Bill Rodriguez, chief executive of FIND, a global aid group working with WHO on expanding access to testing, said “testing rates have plummeted by 70 to 90 per cent.”

“We have an unprecedented ability to know what is happening.

And yet today, because testing has been the first casualty of a global decision to let down our guard, we are becoming blind to what is happening with this virus,” he said.

Experts say Canada needs to develop a robust system to detect COVID-19 activity in the absence of wide-scale PCR testing, which has ultimately led to inaccurate official case counts.

Since the Omicron variant took hold over the winter, provinces and territories have scaled back access to gold-standard PCR testing, citing the lack of capacity to keep up with demand and the need to free up health-care resources.