Ontario to expand take-home COVID-19 test kit program to every school in province

The Ford government is expanding a program to send do-it-yourself PCR testing kits home to school students to every region of the province and formalizing a ‘test-to-stay’ approach for use of rapid tests in school outbreak settings.

Officials told CTV News Toronto by mid November, all 4,800 public schools, as well as any First Nations or private schools that opt-in will have access to lower nasal PCR test swab kits.

Parents could pick the kits up from school during any confirmed exposure event where their child is named as a close contact of a confirmed case, or when their child shows symptoms.

They would administer it at home and bring it back to their school for submission to a nearby lab, hospital or other “community location.”

Several Toronto hospitals launched a take-home test kit program for the city’s schools back in September. All schools received their kits by this week.

Education Minister Stephen Lecce said the expansion was primarily meant to make accessing tests more convenient for working parents.

A recent outbreak that forced the closure of Silverthorn Collegiate Institute in Etobicoke first employed take-home PCR kits to ascertain the extent of the spread of infection among students.

When students returned after the school reopened, rapid antigen test kits were administered for several weeks to ensure there were no new infections.

Officials said schools would have to figure out how to transport the specimen collection kits to and from hospitals or labs on their own.

In Toronto, the hospitals themselves organize couriers to collect kits and bring them in for processing.

When asked why it was taking 50 instructional days into the school year for this program to get underway across the province, Lecce said they had to run the initial program in Toronto and a similar one in Ottawa before moving forward.

“We extended the PCR take-home tests to 160 schools (at first) to understand effectiveness of this model,” he said. “What we’ve heard from them is there is a great benefit for families – and much more convenient for working parents.”

Earlier this month, Ontario Chief Medical Officer Dr. Kieran Moore approved a plan to use rapid antigen COVID-19 tests, which can deliver a preliminary result in as little as 15 minutes, to school students in limited circumstances.

Since then, it not been clear when local public health units should deploy rapid antigen tests in schools.

To date, Toronto Public Health told CP24 it has deployed rapid antigen tests in only two of the more than 800 schools it is responsible for.

Officials revealed more details on how rapid tests will be deployed in schools on Thursday, saying that in the event of a school confirming an exposure, the local public health unit could give each student and staff member in the impacted class a pack of up to five rapid tests.

The student or staff member would self-administer a rapid test every two days after an exposure for a total period of ten days, and stay home from school and seek confirmatory PCR testing if they got a positive result.

Each child can remain in class so long as they continued getting negative rapid test results. The new effort is reactive and would not give pupils a chance to regularly check themselves before attending class in a situation where no other risk or exposure was first identified at their school.

Lecce said the local public health unit could interpret the rapid antigen data and keep classes going with those who test negative, or still close down the class or the whole school if they so chose.

This “test-to-stay” approach has been employed in many U.S. states and the UK, saving thousands of pupils from prolonged stints of isolation.

As the most significant setting still populated with unvaccinated subjects, Ontario schools and childcare settings now routinely generate almost 40 per cent of the province’s known active cases of COVID-19.

The subject of rapid test use among students has generated significant controversy in Ontario this school year.

CP24 discovered the Ministry of Education was supplying federally-procured rapid antigen tests to private schools in September, when public schools had no such access.

A number of parent groups then sought supplies of rapid tests through agencies tasked with supplying millions of tests to Ontario businesses.

The Ford government then blocked agencies from supplying parents with rapid tests.  

Lecce said Thursday he always followed prevailing medical advice when organizing testing for schools, and that evidence now points to rapid antigen testing being useful.

“We’re scaling it up today because of evidence that it is an effective intervention,” he said.

NDP Education critic Marit Stiles said the Ford government should have had better testing access in place at the start of the 2021 school year.

“What is astonishing to me today is that we are in the end of October, this government is talking about getting tests out to schools in mid-November,” she said.

“There’s no excuse for it – this government knew what it needed to do in September – this government took tests away from parents who were crowd-sourcing them, and instead they’ve replaced it all with a worse plan.”

Unvaccinated teachers will now have to take 3 rapid tests per week

Lecce also announced Thursday that Ontario’s estimated 46,000 remaining unvaccinated education staff will now have to submit to rapid antigen testing three times per week, up from twice.

The move will use up approximately 552,000 rapid tests per month.

Earlier in October, the federal government estimated the province had just under 20 million unused rapid antigen test kits in its stockpile.