SYDNEY, N.S. — If you’re getting requests for dried blood samples in the mail from Statistics Canada, consider yourself lucky.
It means you’re one of 48,000 Canadians who will be participating in the Canadian COVID-19 Antibody and Health Survey, one of this country’s largest studies aimed at finding out how many Canadians have been previously infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
“If I got one, I would consider myself very lucky for two reasons,” said Dr. Catherine Hankins, co-chair of the COVID-19 Immunity Task Force, which is supporting the study that will be conducted by Statistics Canada.
“One would be it would give me an opportunity to contribute to the national response and the provincial response because the data from the study is going to be helpful — the findings are going to be very helpful in looking at just how much infection has taken place that we maybe didn’t know about from the case counts because maybe people had asymptomatic infections or they had mild symptoms and never sought testing or maybe it was early on and there wasn’t much testing available. So it will give us a much better picture for what things look like provincially and nationally.
“And second, you get to learn your own result.”
About 4,000 kits were sent out before Christmas in the first wave with 22,000 going out in the second wave which is taking place now. The remaining 22,000 kits will go out in a few weeks time.
In total, about 3,500 Nova Scotians, ages one and older, will be asked to take part in the study. It does require you to take a sample of your blood and send it to the National Microbiology Lab. You will also be asked to complete an online or phone questionnaire at the same time that will ask you about your general health and exposure to COVID-19.
“Eventually the results, which will be analyzed by a few reference labs, will be testing for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies which would suggest a previous COVID-19 infection,” said Peter Jiao, chief of COVID-19 and health data at Statistics Canada, “With the consent of the participant, the antibody results can be mailed to them."
The government of Canada is investing $7 million through the COVID-19 Immunity Task Force in the Canadian COVID-19 Antibody and Health Survey. In total, 48,000 Canadians ages one and up, will receive kits requiring dried blood samples at their homes. The objective is to assess how many Canadians have had COVID-19, and whether they had symptoms or not.
This video link further explains the testing and shows images of the kit.
