Home 99.1 News Asymptomatic COVID Testing For Schools Delayed

Asymptomatic COVID Testing For Schools Delayed

Plans for asymptomatic testing planned for schools across CK and Lambton have been slow out of the gate with a delay over processing.

Deb Crawford is the Director of Education for the St. Clair Catholic District School Board.

“We are postponing our asymptomatic testing right now,” Crawford says. “We’re in the midst of planning it, but we have to wait for some information required by the Ministry of Education from our vendor, GVT Labs and Imaging Services.”

With the shift in timeline, the boards are now looking at running testing over a five-week period instead of seven weeks, and will be running on a hub model with testing sites for all four local boards in communities across Chatham-Kent and Lambton County.

Director of Education for the Lambton Kent District Scohol Board, John Howitt, says there will be stops planned in all centres of the region including Wallaceburg, Blenheim, Ridgetown, and Pain Court.

“We’re going to be rotating through communities,” Howitt says. “Some places will have more than one clinic scheduled within that community, rotating through those five weeks.”

Organizing schools within four different boards comes with a fair bit of legwork. Howitt says they need things like vulnerable sector and criminal checks, insurance, and WSIB clearance, among other things.