The Hastings Prince Edward District School board is eyeing two schools for voluntary school-based COVID-19 testing.
At Monday’s HPEDSB meeting, Hastings Prince Edward Public Health Medical Officer of Health Dr. Piotr Oglaza said that Eastside Secondary School and Centre Hastings Secondary School are being proposed to have testing sites to satisfy the Ministry of Education’s school-based testing requirements.
Oglaza said they’re proposing Eastside due to a recent COVD-19 case that was reported in the school and because the school draws students from Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory which is identified as a high-priority group. He said Central Hastings is being proposed due to the lack of readily available testing in that area.
Oglaza said the proposal would involve once-weekly voluntary testing for students through those two proposed sites.
“Students will have their consent forms sent to parents ahead of time and those who want to be swabbed will be signed up in advance of that public health nurse coming to the school”
He explained that testing would be done by HPE public health nurses and that they would be using PCR tests which Oglaza described as “the gold standard” for COVID-19 testing. He said that results would be brought to the health unit for processing and results would be available in 24 hours.
As for why they only proposed two schools, Oglaza said that due to the low prevalence of COVID-19 in Hastings Prince Edward, doing it across more schools would not be beneficial.
