The five public health units responsible for nearly 2,000 public schools in the Greater Toronto Area deployed rapid antigen COVID-19 tests to schools a total of three times in the first month they were allowed.
The month of October saw dozens of COVID-19 outbreaks declared in GTA schools, especially in Toronto, Peel and York regions.
Throughout that month, across the 1,848 schools in the GTA, rapid antigen tests were used twice in the aftermath of school-wide closures in Toronto and once in Peel Region, according to information provided to CP24 from the individual public health units.
In Toronto, rapid antigen tests were used by students on a voluntary basis when kids returned to class at Greenholme Junior Middle School and Silverthorn Collegiate Institute following full closures due to outbreaks.
“Medical experts note that rapid antigen testing is most useful in contexts where COVID-19 cases and risk of transmission is high and if performed multiple times a week,” Toronto Associate Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Vinita Dubey told CP24. “Given the current lower rates of COVID-19 in Toronto at this time, widespread use of rapid antigen tests can result in more false negative and false positive results,” she said.
In Peel, spokesperson Jeff LeMoine said rapid antigen tests were sent to one school in October that reported an unknown number of COVID-19 cases, but they would not identify that school due to privacy concerns.
In York Region, spokesperson Masrine Peart said testing “criteria developed did not warrant deployment to any school” during the month of October.
Halton and Durham Region public health said neither unit used rapid antigen tests in schools during the month of October.
On Oct. 5, Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Kieran Moore, said he would allow public health units to use rapid antigen testing at schools, providing a number of guidelines for their use but also saying the local health units could exercise their own discretion.
The public school system in the GTA was linked to more than 1,425 confirmed cases of COVID-19 during the month of October, according to public data.
In late September, Ontario’s Ministry of Health blocked dozens of parent groups from acquiring rapid antigen test kits procured by the federal government, despite earlier allowing them to be used in a surveillance role in private schools, and using hundreds of thousands of them on unvaccinated education workers.
After shutting down because they could not access a supply of tests, 30 of the parent-run surveillance networks wrote a letter to Toronto’s Board of Health in mid-October, asking them to “to quickly make regular asymptomatic testing available to all unvaccinated students in public elementary schools in Toronto.”
That has not yet happened. The Ministry of Health has pledged to implement “test to stay” programs at schools with outbreaks going forward, where students identified as close contacts of a confirmed case get packs of rapid tests and can continue to attend school as long as they test negative and show no symptoms.
Sam Kaufman, who helped start one of the city’s first biweekly voluntary surveillance testing networks at Earl Beatty Junior and Senior Public School, told CP24 he is not surprised rapid antigen tests have been used so sparingly in area schools so far.
“My hope on Oct. 5 was that public health units would go use these tools in highest risk areas. That’s really disappointing and it shows a real lack of imagination and a lack of understanding of the potential of these tests.”
Since the time parents from 30 schools who either had surveillance testing up and running, or were working to do so wrote to Toronto Public Health last month, 11 of the schools in the list have now have active cases of COVID-19.
Kaufman said it’s impossible to know for sure if regular surveillance tests would have lowered or prevented the emergence of cases in those schools.
“If those programs had been running, or still been running, or been allowed to start, maybe they would have found some cases before they showed up at schools.”
Meanwhile, Ontario’s stockpile of rapid tests, paid for the federal government and distributed by the province mostly to businesses, post-secondary institutions and school boards for the purpose of testing unvaccinated staff, continues to grow.
Federal data indicated Ontario had nearly 28 million tests in its possession by Oct. 29, with only 7.5 million reported as being used.
Kaufman said there needs to be a focus on preventative surveillance testing in the most-at risk schools, especially given the apparent ample supply.
“There’s no use of these tools except to clean up after outbreaks which is how they’ve been used, and I think it’s very disappointing. It’s not proactive, it’s a reactive program; you want to find cases before you have outbreaks.”
