B.C.’s Medical Health Officer says the province is focusing its testing strategy on areas where it will make the most difference.

Dr. Bonnie Henry says that means continuing to test people at a high risk of infection, health-care workers, and people associated with clusters of the virus.

“We’re particularly focusing on testing people who are in those environments that are high-risk,” Henry said on Wednesday. “So, we have a testing strategy in the shelter system, we have a testing strategy in our long-term care homes, because we know it makes a huge difference if we detect those places early.”

She says even if the province had a greater testing capacity, the approach would be the same it is now.

“We still would not be testing everybody who has very mild illness for a variety of reasons,” she added. “Not only because of capacity – because it’s a waste of resources for a lot of people – but also because we know this test is not 100 per cent. And when people have very mild symptoms, it can be falsely negative.”

Henry says B.C. – which has tested about 45,000 people – remains one of the leaders in COVID-19 testing around the world on a per capita basis.

“So its not like we are not testing. It’s not like we’re just saying, ‘oh, only a few people can do it,” she noted. “It’s just our strategy has changed to focusing on where it makes the most difference, and where it gives us the most information.”

The advice for people who think they may have COVID-19 but haven’t been tested, Henry says, would be the safe if even if they were tested.

“We need to tell them on a population level, anybody who’s sick – especially if you have a fever and a cough – you need to stay away from others, no matter what, whether you have COVID or anything else,” she noted.

And the said the province is doing ‘surveillance testing’ that piggybacks on testing for influenza and other respiratory illnesses. It’s how some of the first cases of community transmission in the province were discovered, and health officials are considering increasing this type of testing in the future.