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Education Dive
Feds to ship 'millions of tests per week' to help schools stay open, official says
Naaz Modan
Sept. 23, 2020
Dive Brief:
During a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
hearing Wednesday, Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health at the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said the federal
government will ship “millions of tests per week” to help schools
reopen and stay open in the coming weeks.
Robert Redfield, director for the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, also said during the hearing that about 90% of U.S.
residents are still susceptible to the coronavirus, and that young
adults, even though they are unlikely to get seriously sick from the
virus, are "major contributors" to the spread of COVID-19.
Nevertheless, health experts have cautioned that testing for COVID-19
should be paired with public action to limit spread of the disease,
like wearing masks and staying home if needed.
Dive Insight:
Quick and accurate testing has been a key obstacle as schools
nationwide push to reopen this fall or later in the academic year. In
New York City, for example, the United Federation of Teachers has made
testing, with results available within 48 hours, a requirement before
it agrees to reopening schools for in-person instruction.
Under an agreement between New York City teachers and the city's
Department of Education that set reopening for Sept. 21, a date that
has since been moved and staggered for older students, the school
system has to establish random and repeated testing, free of charge,
for both adults and students.
District leaders elsewhere have also voiced the importance of testing for a smooth reopening process.
In California's La Honda-Pescadero Unified School District, school
board president Mary Windram told Education Dive "the best thing that
could happen" for her district, which has faced both wildfires and the
pandemic, is affordable testing.
"We don’t have the resources that we need to test," she said. "I would
like to see a state or national testing program with contact tracing
because that could help us plan better so you know when something is
cropping up."
Meanwhile, a September report from the Government Accountability Office
found a lack of coherent guidance from the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Education for state and local
education leaders. A separate analysis by the Center on Reinventing
Public Education (CRPE) shows 23 states and the District of Columbia
failed to provide clear public health guidance to districts making
reopening decisions.
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