At least $70M spent on COVID-19 PCR lab tests in B.C.

The provincial government has spent at least $70 million on laboratory tests of swabs to confirm COVID-19 infection in British Columbians.

While they fund some of the tests through their own budgets, the health authorities have claimed $59.4 million of that total from the Ministry of Health from the start of the pandemic until last month, which they calculate at a rate of $26.73 per sample.

The ministry tells CTV News it has also paid LifeLabs an additional $11.1 million for publicly-funded PCR tests the private company processed from March 2020 to April 2021. The province did not provide the fee LifeLabs charges for each test and says the company no longer processes the tests since “as public testing capacity was determined to be sufficient” in the spring.

The $70 million price tag for testing is for processing the lab tests only, and does not include the costs of running roughly 100 testing centres the province had operated while it was still doing wide-spread testing.

According to data from the Public Health Agency of Canada, British Columbia has performed a total of 5,372,385 PCR tests, however, it’s unclear how many of those are publicly-funded; some industries have been testing their employees several times a week at their expense, whether they have symptoms or not, but the results are rolled into provincial PCR totals. 

According to situation reports published weekly by the BCCDC, between one-third and half of all PCR tests are paid for outside the public system. 

It’s important to note, the province has refused to test people without symptoms of COVID-19 (even though many people are pre-symptomatic carriers of the virus), because it claims the results aren’t reliable enough and don’t find enough cases to justify the effort and expense. Other provinces and countries came to different conclusions and continue to do so.

In December, B.C.’s testing centres were overwhelmed by people looking for lab confirmation as to whether they had the disease and at that point the provincial health officer discouraged all but those at highest risk from being tested and rapid antigen tests, which are not tracked nor the results publicized, were provided to many people. In mid-January health officials quietly changed the testing criteria and now very few people qualify for PCR tests.

Throughout the pandemic, B.C. has been testing for the disease well below the national average on a per capita basis.