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Saliva tests for Covid-19 infections in students have started in earnest in French primary schools, with the government hoping to perform 300,000 weekly tests by mid-March. Observers believe the tests are a last-ditch effort to prevent school closings in one of the few countries that maintain classes during the second and third waves of the epidemic.
France hopes to remain one of the few major countries not to close schools to contain a worsening of the coronavirus epidemic with the mass deployment of tests using saliva samples.
“The fundamental objective… is that French schools remain open,” Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer said of the program during a visit to a primary school in the Haute-Saône department.
“To do this, we need to carry out as many tests as possible,” the minister said. “We have the means in terms of tests and logistics to do it, even if the deployment will be gradual.”
Blanquer said France would be able to perform 300,000 saliva tests per week by mid-March. Health officials expect the tests to help prevent the spread of infections in schools by identifying students who already have the virus.
Attempt to avoid closures
The tests, carried out with parental consent, primarily target primary schools, where children are typically between 6 and 10 years old.
Less invasive than nasal swabs, saliva tests involve the child spitting into a vial and the samples being quickly analyzed for coronavirus antigens in a lab.
The expanded program comes after experimental phases and comes as schools across the country reopen after two-week winter vacation periods, starting and ending in three zones across the country.
It also comes as 20 out of a hundred administrative services are on heightened alert due to more contagious variants of the new coronavirus and the pressure on hospitals.
Most of the alert zones are to the north, east and south-east, including three departments along the Côte d’Azur. The cities of Nice to the south and Dunkirk to the north have already imposed weekend closures to combat their particularly high infection rates.
Changing the consensus on infection in schools
France is one of the few major countries to have avoided closing schools and was one of the few to reopen schools at the end of June 2020, as the first wave of infection subsided, rather than wait until September. .
The program presents a change in attitude towards the attention required for schools, whose propensity for the spread of the virus has long been minimized by the French authorities.
There is now a large consensus among epidemiologists that, contrary to what French authorities have downplayed, the coronavirus is spreading among school students, even though they are less likely than adults to show symptoms.
“Scientific research has evolved and we now know that the virus spreads between children and from children to adults,” Antoine Flahault of the Institute for Global Health at the University of Geneva told the French newspaper The Parisian.
“Between the curfew, local lockdowns and working from home, children are practically the only ones to have social contact. If infections are increasing, they are part of the explanation. ”
The Ministry of Education had no plans to consider closing the schools at this time. The first tests started last Monday.
Studies of more contagious variants of the new coronavirus first detected in Brazil, Britain and South Africa have shown that children are not spared, even though they are less likely to show symptoms.
France is currently closing classes of students infected with the Brazilian or South African variants.
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