(Bloomberg) — Unvaccinated kids who come in contact with someone with Covid-19 shouldn’t be required to stay home from school if they test negative and meet other criteria, U.S. public-health officials said.
Called “test-to-stay,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance for schools calls for at least two tests within seven days after an exposure. If children meet those and other criteria, they can stay in school even if they haven’t been immunized.
The measure “allows unvaccinated children to stay in school, even if they have been exposed to the virus, so that they don’t have to miss school while they’re quarantining at home,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said Friday in a press briefing.
A U.S. surge in omicron Covid cases is “inevitable,” White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci said in the briefing. President Joe Biden’s administration has staked out school reopenings as a sign of success fighting the virus, and has signaled this week that it doesn’t plan to recommend closures in the face of the highly mutated variant.
Biden warned Thursday that the variant will wreak havoc on the unvaccinated, their families and hospitals that are already overwhelmed, and begged people to get vaccines and boosters. “We’re going to keep schools and businesses open if we do this,” he said.
Testing Capacity
A test-to-stay school strategy, however, will rely on substantial testing capacity. Demand is already spiking across the country, and Biden’s administration has faced pressure over shortages of affordable at-home rapid tests.
The supply chain for Covid-19 testing is still not where it needs to be to enable this type of strategy in every school district Romney M. Humphries, medical director of Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinical Microbiology Laboratory, said in an Infectious Diseases Society of America briefing on Dec. 15.
“Running a clinical lab, I still deal with trying to get Covid testing reagents on a weekly basis,” she said. “These are great strategies, but we do need to be able to resource them appropriately for them to be effective. And we’re really still not quite there yet with the testing supplies.”
To be successful, testing strategies need adequate resources, Joshua Barocas, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Colorado, added during the IDSA call.
“The test-to-stay strategy is a very good strategy,” Boracas said, “but we have to understand that different school districts have different resources.”
(Corrects Walensky quote in third paragraph to read “unvaccinated children”)
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