Keeping Schools Open 2021: We Need to Test The Children

Antigen tests are cheap, easy to read, widely available, and importantly, sensitive when viral loads are high.

Somehow, it’s already August. And that means soon millions of children across the country will be heading back to school.

We thought the days of broad school closures were behind us. Though there was a concern last year that reopening schools would lead to a bunch of adorable little viral vectors running around, driving community spread, no such link was found. Schools, especially those that did a good job with masking and ventilation — appeared to pose a relatively low risk to public health.

This school year, things have changed. On the plus side, teachers — who are at substantially higher risk of serious complications from COVID-19 than their students– are able to be vaccinated. In some cases, they have even been mandated to be vaccinated.

But something else has changed. The delta variant has turned out to be a transmission machine — with a highly-cited, and still not yet peer reviewed study suggesting 1000-fold higher viral loads in the noses of those with delta compared to other variants, and an internal CDC document likening the infectiousness of delta to chickenpox — pegging the R0 (the…