A milliliter of saliva to hope to destroy the chains of contamination. This is what the saliva tests carried out in schools for the past week consist of. This is the government’s new weapon to strengthen the strategy of “test, alert, protect”. A much less unpleasant screening than PCR tests.

But beforehand, all the parents of these students of Bourg-la-Reine gave their agreement, as in all the other establishments. The next morning, they will be informed of the results. A similar operation was carried out the day before on 300 children in another school where seven positive cases were detected.

Objective: 300,000 tests per week

“The positive tests will be screen tested to possibly identify a British, South African or Brazilian variant” explains Patrice Hérisson, regional director of Île-de-France Cerballiance. And if three cases of classic Covid are discovered in the same class, it is immediately closed. The procedure changes and hardens if a variant is found.

Strengthening epidemic surveillance is precisely the government’s ambition by deploying this new tool. “The objective is really to be in a preventive strategy, to broadly screen a new target population that are children in kindergarten and primary school. But also to identify possible asymptomatic positive cases.

And then to come and carry out these tests at regular intervals, every three weeks to see a little the possible evolution of the circulation of the virus in these schools “ details Aurélie Thouet, deputy director of the Hauts-de-Seine delegation of the ARS Île-de-France. Ultimately, 40,000 tests per week should be carried out in schools in Ile-de-France and 300,000 across the country by mid-March.