“Routine testing really has the potential to greatly reduce within-school COVID-19 transmission, and in some cases, even completely eliminate it,” agrees Divya Vohra, an epidemiologist at Mathematica, a research organization with headquarters in Princeton, N.J., who studies testing pilot programs. In other words, regular testing of all students and staff will catch far more COVID-19 cases than simply testing those who demonstrate COVID-19 symptoms or have a known exposure to the virus. During Omaha’s pilot of frequent, asymptomatic testing, the rate of cases detected in the school testing program was six times as high as the case rate reported by traditional testing for symptomatic students only. The pilot program detected 70 cases per 1,000 students, compared with 12 per 1,000 in the official tally reported by the local public health department, researchers report September 22. Catching those cases is crucial to nipping outbreaks in the bud and keeping kids in school and healthy.
[url=http://https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid-testing-school-works-coronavirus-pandemic-reopening][/url]
