Under fire, the company managing COVID-19 testing at Canada’s border insists it’s ready for the next phase of the pandemic

OTTAWA-The company running mandatory COVID-19 testing for people arriving in Canada is gearing up for an increase in travel.

Whether that's coming this summer, next fall or next year, it doesn't know.

But in an exclusive interview with the Star, the executive team at Switch Health expressed little doubt that testing will remain part of the travel landscape until the day that COVID-19 goes away.

We don't have a crystal ball to look into right now, but what we can do is prepare," said Olga Jilani, Switch's chief financial officer.

Frustrations that Canada wasn't prepared when the federal government implemented mandatory testing for incoming travellers in February has led to a lot of scrutiny of the Toronto-based company.

Switch Health was hired earlier this year by the Public Health Agency of Canada to provide test kits to those crossing by land, perform arrival tests for people landing at Pearson, and manage tests for travellers waiting out their quarantines at home.

As of the end of April, more than 180 formal complaints about Switch Health had been registered with PHAC. Travellers also took to social media to document their struggles with getting tests picked up, wait times for appointments, or confusion around finding supervision to take the test.

Two members of Switch's team are expected to face a grilling at a House of Commons committee hearing later this week, after MPs have repeatedly raised concerns around whether the testing regime is robust enough to slow the importation of COVID-19 cases, particularly if border restrictions are loosened in the coming months.

Switch insists it is ready - and very mindful how much travellers are counting on it.

It's not fun being quarantined," CEO Dilian Stoyanov said in an interview. Every day feels like 10, and so we want to make sure that people are out in time."

While the company doesn't dismiss the complaints it has received, it puts them in the context of having processed upwards of 600,000 tests.

Since mandatory testing went into effect in February, Switch has scaled up its operations, going from a staff of several dozen to a payroll of more than 2,000 full-time, part-time and contract positions.

Wait times for a nurse to supervise a COVID-19 test have dropped from over an hour to just 16 minutes, a decline Switch attributes to pre-booking appointments and expanding the number of supervisors.

Data provided to the House of Commons shows that in the first two months of operations, about 17 per cent of test results weren't delivered by the end of a person's 14-day mandatory quarantine.

A late-April policy change to require a second test on day eight, and not day 10, has now meant that nearly all the test results are back in time.

Another issue the company confronted in the early months of the program was how to co-ordinate pickups of at-home tests. Initially, there was limited pickup capability on weekends, leading to bottlenecks. Then there were the unique realities of Canadian geography. It's one thing for a traveller quarantining in Toronto to schedule a pickup for their at-home test. It's another thing entirely for someone living in a remote outpost in the Yukon, or off the coast of British Columbia; for one traveller there, the company had to rent a boat and arrange for the test to be dropped off at a local general store.

The company has partnerships with Purolator and Uber, as well as local delivery agencies in more remote locations. It has now set up Saturday pickups and is working on Sunday pickups as well.

But all this has happened with travel at just a fraction of what it was pre-pandemic. Since Jan. 1, about 3.9 million people have arrived in Canada by land or air, compared to 94 million people during the same period of 2019.

Those entering the country now are subject to testing and quarantine, and must be either Canadian citizens or permanent residents; if they're not, they must be from a list of approved exceptions, including agricultural labour, certain international students, or people coming to work on COVID-19 response.

Though the number of COVID-19 cases linked specifically to international travel is less than two per cent, Jilani pointed out that 2,500 of the 6,500 positive cases that Switch's testing has uncovered were found after people had already been in quarantine for several days.

We think everyone agrees that in that capacity - protecting Canadians, protected communities - 2,500 caught positives is a significant number," she said.

Stoyanov said the company is putting in place the required capacity for when travel numbers start to increase, because they will, and that work is being done in part by using previous travel data and migration patterns to estimate what that travel will look like.

We are hopeful that we get to a reopening," said Stoyanov. It's all about reopening the economy."

With files from The Canadian Press

Stephanie Levitz is an Ottawa-based reporter covering federal politics for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @StephanieLevitz