Ontario urged to prioritize students for rapid tests
Lack of provincial strategy raises concerns about access and equality, advocates say
In a bid to get rapid tests into York Region schools, Muna Kadri hit a lot of dead ends. Wherever she looked, there seemed to be few options for asymptomatic students, other than to pay $40 a pop at Shoppers Drug Mart.
Now Kadri, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation District 16, says she’s ready, if she must, to rent a U-Haul and drive 130 kilometres to pick up rapid tests via a free program in Waterloo Region. While grateful for the resource, she says the situation can only be described as “mind-boggling.”
“How preposterous is it that these are the lengths we have to go through?”
Kadri’s work is part of a hodgepodge of efforts forming across Ontario to improve access to rapid antigen screening for asymptomatic students — a measure some experts have called a safe and sensible addition to the COVID mitigation toolkit.
But even where self-organized efforts are successful, those scrambling for rapid tests say their plans are no replacement for a sustainable — and equitable — provincewide strategy.
“We are very concerned about the ongoing inequities in COVID-related health efforts,” said Nadine Blum, who is part of a group of east-end Toronto parents mobilizing to get rapid testing into RH McGregor Elementary School.
Recognizing that not all communities will have the time and resources to do the same, the group has now launched a petition, calling on the Ontario government to step in.
“We believe that these tests should be made available to all unvaccinated kids,” Blum said. “And it shouldn’t be up to us parents to make this happen.”
Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. Kieran Moore, recently said asymptomatic rapid antigen testing is currently not worth the burden, so long as community infection rates remain low. The tests would lead to more false positives than true positives, which would require confirmatory PCR tests, followed by a quarantine period, Moore said. He said things could change if infections rise.
Caitlin Clark, spokesperson for Education Minister Stephen Lecce, said the province has a “cautious reopening plan in place with enhanced cleaning, strict screening, the deployment of take-home tests, and significant ventilation improvements across all Ontario schools.”
“We will continue to follow the expert advice of the Chief Medical Officer of Health, with the singular aim of minimizing disruption and maximizing safety and learning within Ontario schools.”
On top of testing requirements for staff who aren’t yet vaccinated, the Education Ministry has also launched a pilot rapid testing program for asymptomatic students — 18 York Region District School Board secondary schools are among those selected to participate.
But the province also recently withdrew support for private schools who developed rapid testing programs, saying they were ineligible for free COVID-19 tests for asymptomatic surveillance through the provincewide rapid antigen screening program.
Far from restricting asymptomatic screening, Kadri wants to see more of it.
“I’m not looking to take tests away from anybody,” she said. “I’m looking to make it equitable and expand access.”
“Schools are the only remaining places where we actually want unvaccinated people to congregate,” said Dr. Irfan Dhalla, an internal medicine doctor at St. Michael’s Hospital and a vice-president at Unity Health Toronto.
“So it makes sense to do everything we can to reduce transmission there — not only for the kids themselves, but also for their families and the wider community.”
Ideally, rapid tests would be administered to “every unvaccinated child every few days, at every school in Ontario,” said Dhalla, who is also co-chair of the federal government’s expert advisory panel on COVID-19 testing and screening.
As the pandemic nears its twoyear mark, it’s now known that “the performance characteristics of rapid antigen tests are very good, especially when they are used frequently,” he added.
If testing in all schools isn’t possible, Dhalla is “very much of the view that we should focus public resources on schools that are in communities where disease incidence is highest.”
Anna-Kay Brown, co-chair of Jane Finch Education Action Group and chair of her local parent council, said she’s been told saliva test kits are available upon request at her kids’ school. But she’s concerned about broader inequities that have put her community at risk, and about who will assume the burden of fixing them.
“The majority of initiatives … always fall upon community and grassroots organizations and residents,” she said.
“It’s great there are schools in the city that are able to be ahead of the game,” added Sabrina Butterfly GoPaul, resident member of Jane Finch Action Against Poverty. “But I think that speaks to the inequities when you have affluent areas and parents who might not be as stretched as our parents who are working precarious hours.”
While around 72 per cent of high school students in Ontario are now fully immunized, elementary school kids are not yet eligible for the jab. Data from the non-profit health research group ICES shows vulnerable groups like refugees and recent OHIP registrants still lag behind the provincial immunization rate — including in the 1215 age bracket in high-risk neighbourhoods.
Kadri’s concerns over asymptomatic screening sprang in part from unmasked break times: in her region, she says lunches aren’t always staggered, and she believes the testing net needs to be cast more widely to catch students who may unwittingly have been exposed to COVID.
“All I’m asking for is access to asymptomatic testing for those who want it,” she said. “When a school has a case, (why not) have them available for anyone in the building?”
In a quest for answers, she contacted Waterloo Region’s StaySafe program, which launched this spring with the backing of all three levels of government and is designed to help small businesses and nonprofits conduct rapid antigen screening.
For the most part, that means providing individual “ambassadors” with a two-week supply — around 100 tests — at a time. To date, StaySafe has distributed over one million free rapid tests all over southern Ontario, in cities spanning from London to Peterborough, said Samantha Clark, a spokesperson for partner organization Communitech.
Some applicants are using tests at their kids’ schools, said Clark. But while the program has “been told access to supply isn’t an issue,” she notes that the team is small and does not “have the capacity to help set up rapid antigen screening programs in all schools specifically.”
Susitha Wanigaratne, who helped mobilize rapid tests for RH McGregor elementary school in Toronto, calls asymptomatic screening an “important, low-cost tool to help prevent outbreaks and keep our schools open.” But she said it’s “baffling and upsetting” that the existing provincewide antigen screening program is currently geared toward businesses.
That provincial program has distributed 24 million tests to “over 24,000 organizations and workplaces across the province” to date, a Health Ministry spokesperson said. The ministry said it’s also “building on the success” of the Waterloo Region Stay Safe pilot by partnering with chambers of commerce to provide rapid tests to small and medium-sized businesses.
To Wanigaratne, students should be a priority.
“The last few years have been a gong show, education-wise, and many of our kids are suffering from learning and social, and emotional deficits.”
Rapid testing is not a silver bullet, and Kadri wants to see other precautions in place, too; she says she’s concerned, for example, that some teachers in her region have been told they could face progressive discipline if they wear higher-grade masks than those issued by the school board. (A spokesperson for York Region said teachers are required to wear the medical-grade masks per Education Ministry guidelines, but did not respond to questions about possible discipline.)
In the Jane-Finch community, Brown wants to see smaller class sizes — and steps to address the historic deficit in resourcing.
“We’ve always experienced barriers and systemic issues, and the pandemic heightened that.”
Uneven access to rapid tests, said GoPaul, is just one symptom of that larger challenge.
“Our schools have been hugely impacted in the first, second, third and fourth waves,” she said. “They’re a microcosm of the world around them.”