Guelph’s public health unit says it will participate in the province’s new targeted COVID-19 rapid test program in schools and licensed child-care settings.
The Ontario government announced on Tuesday morning that tests for unvaccinated students with no symptoms will be made available to locations where transmission is high.
Within hours of that announcement, Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health announced its intention to participate and that planning locally is already underway.
“I am pleased to see the province add this layer of protection,” said medical officer of health Dr. Nicola Mercer.
“This program adds another local tool to fight this pandemic in Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph. Locally, we will use the best available health data to ensure these tests are used as effectively as possible to protect children who are most at risk from COVID-19.”
Public health added that while the program is still in development, officials are already trying to identify which schools and child-care centres are the most appropriate for rapid testing.
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Rapid test kits will be provided to schools and child-care settings through school boards, school administration or facility management and parents will have the option to choose whether their unvaccinated asymptomatic child participates in the program.
“COVID-19 can seriously impact a child’s health and their social and school lives,” said Mercer.
“Testing gives us another way to protect individual children and those they live with, learn with and play with.”
The announcement from the province comes after groups of parents had organized surveillance testing for their schools using the rapid test kits, but the government told agencies to stop distributing them to anyone but businesses.
Ontario’s chief medical officer of health Dr. Kieran Moore has said widespread asymptomatic surveillance testing in schools isn’t recommended because it isn’t an effective tool.
“When you apply these tests in a low-risk setting you’ll find that you get more false positives than true positives and you’ll send people for PCR testing as a result and they’ll be off school because they have to wait for the result,” he said.
As of Tuesday, government figures showed 796 out of 4,844 schools in the province had at least one COVID-19 case. Six schools are closed as a result of positive cases.
The Upper Grand and Wellington Catholic district school boards are reporting seven cases among six schools in Guelph and Wellington County.
The government has declined to add COVID-19 vaccinations to the list of mandatory immunizations for children to attend school, such as measles and chickenpox.
—with files from The Canadian Press and Global News’ Jessica Patton
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