Photo: Xinhua

COVID-19 epidemic prevention authorities in Huangzhou district, which is the downtown area of Huanggang of Central China's Hubei Province, has issued a notice regulating all graduating students at middle schools and faculty staff to take anti-body tests every 14 days after school reopens. 

According to the circular issued by the Huangzhou district epidemic prevention and control command on Tuesday, local graduating middle schoolers must take nucleic acid and anti-body tests before May 24 and the school faculty employees will also follow the suit, Hubei Daily reported on Wednesday.

Family members of commuting students are also required to take nucleic acid tests before May 25.

Those who are related to confirmed COVID-19 cases, suspected cases and have close contact with asymptomatic are demanded to take extra CT scan and blood tests. And those who fail to take tests in time and display positive results are not allowed to return to schools, read the notice.

The number of students should be reduced to 30 per class, and graduating students of the middle school should be under strict physical isolation just as that for graduating students of the senior high schools.

Date of school reopening in Huanggang was previously announced to be set for May 25, media reported.

There is no report of such regulation applied in other parts of Hubei Province, a region once hit hardest by the COVID-19 in China, as of press time.

Sha Sha, a local resident, told the Global Times that the new measure is most likely related to a recent case of a senior high school student living in Ezhou but studies in Huanggang who tested positive for being a silent carrier in mass testing before schools reopened,. 

"Although the student did not contact anybody and raise panic, schools decided to tighten measures. All high school graduating students are required to study and sleep at schools and some middle school graduating students who go back home after classes are required to be taken by their parents one by one. They are also banned from going anywhere except their homes and schools," Sha Sha said. 

Sha Sha said these students are supportive of the policy and all the tests are free. 

According to her, middle school graduating students are expected to go back to school on May 25. 

The Huanggang educational bureau confirmed with the Global Times the content of the notice on Wednesday, but declined to reveal what had motivated local authorities to roll out such a policy.

"Such a routine decision regarding anti-body tests for students has hardly any scientific basis and constitutes to a waste of resources," Yang Zhanqiu, a deputy director of the pathogen biology department at Wuhan University, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

Yang pointed out that only nucleic acid test results could guide the work of infection prevention, and outcomes of anti-body tests cannot.

Rather, the value of anti-body tests lie in providing data for epidemiological studies, Yang noted.

As the second-most populous city in Hubei with a population of 7.5 million people, Huanggang had reported the second-highest number of confirmed cases at one point of the outbreak, behind the provincial capital Wuhan.