How could opening the border to Canadians impact Whatcom’s COVID testing availability?
With the U.S. less than two weeks away from allowing vaccinated Canadian citizens to cross the border on Nov. 8, Whatcom County will ask Washington state for aid to help prepare for an anticipated increased demand on its COVID-19 testing facilities.
Testing for travel purposes is already accounting for approximately 50% of all tests ordered within the county, Whatcom County Health Director Erika Lautenbach told the Whatcom County Council during its Tuesday, Oct. 26, meeting, when she announced the plans to ask the state for aid for additional personnel to support additional testing within the county.
“We’re also seeing that about 50% of the travel-related tests are for non-Whatcom residents,” Lautenbach told the council. “So we do recognize that we’re providing not just a county service, but a regional service for folks who want to go to Canada or travel elsewhere.”
The impact of travel screening is likely to increase when the U.S. opens its border to vaccinated Canadians for non-essential travel on Nov. 8, Lautenbach said.
Though the U.S. will not require vaccinated Canadians to provide a negative COVID test result in addition to proof of vaccination, at this point, Canada will require a negative test result within 72 hours of arriving at the border in order for them to return home. That test must be a molecular test, rather than a rapid antigen test, and can take one to two days to get a result.
While short stays may not require Canadians to get tested in the U.S., any stays longer than 24 hours likely will, prompting some U.S. lawmakers to write letters to Canadian officials asking them to reconsider their country’s testing requirement, according to a CBC story.
Gary Kashak, a council member in Windsor, Ontario, called the Canadian requirement of a test a “huge burden” for people looking to take advantage of the border reopening even for day trips, especially considering travel screening tests can cost Canadians $200, according to a story by the Windsor Star.
That means Canadians who do cross may need to get tested before returning home, and that could create extra testing demand in Whatcom County.
After some struggles to have enough capacity earlier during COVID’s fifth wave — now being called the delta wave — Lautenbach told the council that Whatcom County testing facilities are currently meeting demand, adding that there has been same-day availability at the community testing site at Bellingham International Airport so far this week.
“Since the fifth surge began about July 4, testing demand at the community testing site quadrupled from about a thousand tests per week to 4,000 tests per week at the beginning of September,” Lautenbach told the council. “We’re now providing about 3,500 tests per week, as of the first week of October.
“Our drive-through testing site provides, on average, about 40 to 50 percent of all COVID tests in the county, and we have worked really close with Northwest Labs to try to increase hours and increase staffing for that.”
Updated testing data for the county is not available, as the Washington State Department of Health’s COVID-19 Data Dashboard paused the release of new testing data on Sept. 15 through Sunday, Oct. 31, to allow the department to “work to increase its capacity to process the increased testing data volume received in the last few months.”
How big an impact the border reopening will have on Canadians coming to Whatcom County is not clear.
Since Canada began allowing vaccinated Americans to cross the border on Aug. 9, cross-border traffic has increased, but not to pre-pandemic levels, according to data released by Canada Border Services Agency.
In the Pacific Region, which includes the five Ports of Entry from Whatcom County into British Columbia among others, Canada reported 270,775 foreign nationals made crossings from the U.S. into Canada between Aug. 9 and Oct. 17 (or about 27,078 crossings per week).
That is approximately two-and-a-half times the number of foreign visitors Canada welcomed during a similar time period in 2020 (10,511 crossings per week) when the border was closed to non-essential travel, but less than a third of the 95,881 crossings per week seen in 2019 before COVID hit the area.
