COVID tests for school kids: Israel gives every child a test kit as schools reopen

In one of the world’s largest deployments of home COVID tests, Israel is asking families to screen all children under the age of 12 before schools and kindergartens reopen on Wednesday following summer vacation.

Over-12s who are unvaccinated are also being given tests, and some schools are also distributing the test kits to vaccinated pupils, as the Delta variant has broken through immunity on numerous occasions.

The initiative is an ambitious attempt to identify and isolate kids who are infected but don’t realize it before they head to classrooms and infect other children as well as staff. Infection from the Delta strain commonly goes unnoticed among youth, and the country is still deep in the throes of a wave of the highly infectious variant. ...