Canada’s High Arctic may still be free of the novel coronavirus. A case of COVID-19 supposedly confirmed in the remote Nunavut community of Pond Inlet last week has turned out to be a false positive. “Huge relief,” said David Stockley, the hamlet’s chief administrative officer. “It answered a lot of prayers for a lot of people.” Last Thursday, the territory reported what it thought was its first case of infection — a person in the hamlet of about 1,600 on the northern tip of Baffin Island.
On Monday, the territory’s chief medical health officer said there had been a false positive by a lab in Ontario. Nunavut does its tests twice — once in Iqaluit and then a confirmatory test in the south.