A trio of Toronto hospital networks are planning to distribute take-home COVID-19 test kits to schools and school-based daycares in a bid to avoid last fall’s debacle of kids and parents waiting hours at assessment centres to get swabbed once schools reopened.
Michael Garron, Women’s College and Sick Kids hospitals say they will be distributing and collecting take-home kits to more than 800 schools and hundreds of embedded school daycares throughout the city.
The plan, first reported by the Toronto Star, is meant to help avoid scenes experienced by parents last September and October, when strict symptom screening requirements and a lack of available testing capacity saw parents and kids wait as long as seven hours at some assessment centres.
The province’s official testing guidance was eventually narrowed to exclude voluntary asymptomatic testing in order to erase a backlog that at one point hit 90,000 specimens.
Dr. Julia Orkin of Sick Kids Hospital told CP24 the kits will be on hand at all schools, but are meant to confirm or rule out COVID-19 infection based on symptoms observed, and will not be used as a general widespread surveillance tool.
“If a staff member or a student fails a COVID-19 screener or has a symptom that is consistent with COVID-19, they have the ability to take a test kit home – take the test kit, produce a sample, bring it to a safe non contact location, test be brought back to hospital,” Orkin said.
She added the schools will follow existing Toronto Public Health and Ontario guidelines meaning symptomatic individuals and high-risk close contacts of confirmed cases will be offered the kits.
They will be available to staff, students and anyone in their households.
A Sick Kids Hospital spokesperson said they hope to have the kits sent everywhere by mid-October.
The Toronto District School Board’s first school day is scheduled to be Sept. 9.
The program will involve take-home specimen collection kits and scheduled courier pickups to take the samples to labs, similar to what is offered to returning air travellers at Pearson International Airport.
Hospital spokespeople told CP24 the kits will not be rapid tests, and will be processed in a full PCR laboratory process.
Orkin said the turnaround for results will be between 24 to 48 hours.
She said the kits are another way schools can more quickly isolate sick children and hopefully remain open longer than last year.
“Children and youth in our communities have been suffering and that getting them back to school, fixing that learning gap, supporting them with safe socialization within the school environment is essential. The faster we can test and support the better we can ensure that school stays safe for them.”
