The chief medical officers of the Air Canada and WestJet, as well as Toronto Pearson airport, have called on governments to shift PCR testing from airports to communities, a move they say will free up 8,000 testing kits a day in Toronto alone for better use.

The message, delivered via an open letter to federal and Ontario political and medical officials amplifies similar sentiments made in recent days by the Canadian Travel and Tourism Roundtable.

Collectively penned by Dr. Jim Chung (Air Canada), Dr. Edward Wasser (Toronto Pearson) and Dr. Tammy McKnight (WestJet), the trio of CMOs make the case that Canada’s “scarce” testing resources are better utilized “where Canadians need them most,” such as schools, hospitals, and long-term care homes – and not airports, where arriving passengers are already required to be both fully vaccinated and pre-tested before arrival, and where the positivity rate of tested passengers is 10 times less than in the community at large.

About 1.08% of fully vaccinated air travellers from abroad who were tested between Nov. 28 and Dec. 25 yielded a positive COVID-19 test result, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada.

While the positivity rate ticked up to just over two percent in the week before Christmas, the figure falls far short of the national average positivity rate of 28 per cent highlighted by the agency Friday.

Air Canada, WestJet and Pearson want the government to revert to random arrival testing of international travellers and only require isolation for those arriving from overseas if they exhibit symptoms or test positive.

The Canadian Travel and Tourism Roundtable also urged the federal government Friday to redeploy its testing capacity and return to random testing for international passengers.

“Many of those tests are being sent to other provinces for processing. And the processing time, which is supposed to have a standard delivery of three days, is exceeding that,” says Tourism Industry Association of Canada president Beth Potter. “Travellers are looking at that and saying, ‘I don’t want to spend seven of my 10-day vacation in a hotel room waiting for test results.”

Dr. Lynora Saxinger, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Alberta, stressed the value of testing as way to monitor new variants.

“Essentially the travellers are kind of sampling the world for us. And for positive cases among travellers we would want to get genomic sequencing done,” she said. “If there were a new, more transmissible or in any other way worse variants, it is fairly likely that incoming travellers would be the thin edge of the wedge.”

But mandatory airport testing adds little “immediate value” to preventing the spread of Omicron, Saxinger added.

Chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam said Friday that the policy will be evaluated.

“Tracking every case isn’t really necessary for a surveillance perspective,” she told reporters in Ottawa. “When the whole world has Omicron, our next-door neighbour has Omicron, for the most part… we could do sampling for the tests instead of testing maybe every single vaccinated individual.”

The letter in full:

“Dear Hon. Jean-Yves Duclos, P.C., Minister of Health; Dr. Theresa Tam, Chief Public Health Officer of Canada; Hon. Christine Elliott, Deputy Premier of Ontario and Minister of Health; and Dr. Kieran Moore, Ontario Chief Medical Officer of Health:

Over the last two months, Omicron has quickly become the predominant variant of COVID-19. As it spreads throughout our communities, we need to ensure Canada’s limited testing resources are being used where Canadians need them most – to support our communities, schools, hospitals, and long-term care homes.

As the government has ramped up testing at airports for international arrivals, we have seen frontline workers struggle to get PCR tests and lab processing capacity decrease significantly. There is a growing discrepancy between resources allocated to asymptomatic travellers and to those who need it most. In the most recent week of reported, over 123,000 PCR tests were conducted at Canada’s airports with an average positivity rate of 3 percent. Meanwhile, the positivity rate in our communities is now approximately 30 percent and could be higher due to the under-reporting of positivity from a lack of tests.

A recent study prepared for the Manchester Airports Group found that travel testing at best delayed the peak of cases by no more than 5 days, and made total case counts only 3 percent lower. This was because Omicron was prevalent in the communities long before it was detected as a variant of concern in South Africa. Indeed, here in Canada as well, we have learned that Omicron was present and circulating in our communities long before the first official case was declared in Canada.

As every person travelling to Canada must take a PCR test prior to getting on a plane inbound to Canada and must be fully vaccinated, there is no good public health rationale for a second test upon arrival. We know that the primary concern for Omicron is in the community. By extension, the primary need for testing is in our community; not at our airports. Now is the time to act. We call on the Government of Canada to work with Ontario to implement the following measures immediately to support our healthcare system and our communities:

• Remove mandatory arrivals testing from airports and shift these scarce resources to our schools, community, and healthcare system.

• Revert to surveillance arrival testing of international air passengers.

• Require mandatory isolation for persons arriving from an international location if they are exhibiting symptoms or test positive on a surveillance test. Travellers who are asymptomatic after receiving their negative pre-departure test before travel to Canada should not be required to isolate.

Collectively, our organizations have worked hard to keep travel safe, and we have achieved a positivity rate that is 10 times less than community spread. Now is the time to shift testing resources to where they’re needed most. Removing arrivals PCR testing from Toronto Pearson airport alone would free up 8,000 tests a day for the GTA, which will help keep our most vulnerable – those in long-term care, hospitals and our children attending school – safe.

Now is the time to put scarce testing resources where Canadians need them most: in our communities and not in our airports.”

Related article: Time to end arrivals tests.