Ontario is launching a rapid testing portal for all essential businesses to access free rapid testing kits as the province continues to tackle a third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Any essential businesses with more than 150 employees are encouraged to participate in the Provincial Antigen Screening Program by registering through the new portal.

Free rapid antigen screening kits will be provided to these businesses to help screen for asymptomatic cases of COVID-19.

"These are kits that you deploy in your place of business. It's a different kind of a swab. It's self-administered, so you put it in your own nostril and in 15 minutes you have a test," Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade Vic Fedeli told CP24 on Wednesday.

A rapid test can be performed anywhere on-site and does not require shipping a test specimen to a lab for processing.

Positive results from a rapid test must be confirmed with laboratory-based polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing.

The Provincial Antigen Screening Program was initially launched as a pilot in Nov. 2020 and was available for essential workplaces in high transmission and rural and remote areas.

Now the program has expanded to include any essential business with more than 150 employees that is allowed to be open and requires staff to work on-site.

For small and medium sized businesses with fewer than 150 workers, they can obtain rapid tests through a program jointly run by the Ontario government and the Ontario Chamber of Commerce.

"This gets the kits right across Ontario into these small businesses who can continue now to test their employees, and it's really all about bringing another level of safety, another level of security and catching the screening for those cases that might otherwise be missed," Fideli said.

In an effort to encourage rapid testing and reduce the administrative burden, the Ministry of Health says it is updating program requirements so that organizations providing rapid screening won’t have to report preliminary positive results to public health units nor report results of confirmatory lab-based PCR tests to the province, as the results of positive PCR tests are already reported to local public health units through the provincial lab network.

To date, Ontario has delivered more than nine million rapid testing kits to nearly 1,600 workplaces.