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Today is Orange Shirt Day, also known as Truth and Reconciliation Day:

https://www.orangeshirtday.org/about-us.html

There are some poignant stories on the site regarding residential schools and some of the horrific events that took place in those institutions. I found Phyllis's story particularly heart-rending.

Of course, many of us have read Gord Downie's story, published shortly before he died. And I've read a few of James Bartleman's books too, as well as attending some of his presentations. In addition to having attended a residential school himself and being a strong advocate for those grappling with some of the aftermath, he is also a wonderful supporter of libraries and mental health services.

Looking at the analogy between kids shipped off to residential schools and kids forced into home-schooling by public health restrictions arising from the pandemic, I can see a kind of bitter irony here. With residential schools, indigenous children were forcefully uprooted from their families, their communities, their reserves, their culture. During pandemic lockdown, children all over the world became more firmly rooted (down-rooted?) or entrenched within their particular nuclear family or household, cut off from friends, extended family, classmates, teachers and other members of their community. Both represent a kind of prison or confinement, regardless of the rationale for it. Both engender a degree of suffering, be it mild or extreme.

Both the pandemic and Truth and Reconciliation are big-ticket items on the Canadian government's agenda. So today, wear orange and reflect.

Do-it-yourself tests that you get at the pharmacy and carry out in the privacy of your own home: surely that's not such a radical idea these days? I mean, where would we be without home pregnancy tests, for example? So why not self-testing for COVID-19?

Once kids go back to school, it will fall to the students and their parents to decide each day whether they are well enough to go to school each morning. They've been advised to err on the side of caution. It seems to me that giving them one more tool to aid in this crucial decision-making process is eminently sensible. Many doctors and other health care professionals would agree but not, it seems, our federal health authority.

Tests currently exist that enable you to spit into a tube or swab your nose, wait a few minutes, and get a positive or negative result. Some of these rapid tests are designed to detect viral proteins, others to detect viral RNA. While they are not as sensitive, and therefore not as reliable as RT-PCR testing (the kind that's much more expensive, that you have to line up for 4 hours to get, and for which you need to wait several days for results), they're great for providing the kind of quick preliminary diagnosis that parents are going to be expected to make on a regular basis, whether or not they have much health care expertise!

One of the doctors making an urgent plea to the feds to reconsider is Dr. Andrew Morris of the Sinai Health System and University Health Network in Toronto. He points out that without a vaccine or reliable treatment or cure, our best bet is to keep infected people out of buildings where they will unknowingly spreading the virus. "Which is why he finds it 'absurd' that Heath Canada [sic] says the risks of home or self-testing kits outweigh the benefits."

The official Health Canada position is that if we let the great unwashed use these kits, they won't use them properly, they'll misinterpret the results, there'll be too many false negatives and it won't be possible to collect all the results, which are crucial to shaping public policy. Hmmm. That sounds a lot like the reasons they initially touted for NOT wearing masks! Rather paternalistic if you ask me. Moreover, in their excess of spit and vinegar, it seems to me that they may actually be INCREASING our potential risk of exposure.

So here's a link to the article I read:

https://nationalpost.com/health/home-covid-19-tests-could-help-find-people-while-they-are-contagious-experts-say-health-canada-isnt-convinced

The perfect test doesn't exist and there are still lots of things we need to get a handle on. For instance:

We need a more complete list of possible symptoms - better still if we can pinpoint a few reliable symptoms that are not also symptomatic of dozens of other common illness.

When people are asymptomatic but test positive, how often should they be re-tested?

How long is the incubation period, when a person is contagious but showing no symptoms? And how long do they remain contagious after they have apparently recovered?

How long does immunity last after the patient is fully recovered? We need to know this even once we have a vaccine, in order to plan the timing of booster shots.

These things have assumed an even greater urgency just lately, as the new cases being identified increasingly involve young people. Moreover, young people - youth and young adults - tend to be precisely the ones who do not have the luxury of staying home and isolating. They need to be getting an education and holding down a job, establishing themselves in a career, meeting people, perhaps travelling too - not all of which can be accomplished in a strictly online environment.

I'll be following this story closely.