How Do We Go Back to School Safely After a Break?

How do we go back to school safely after a break?
Anonymous

Rapid testing. (Presumably you knew this would be my answer.)

Restricting what people can do over the holidays is not likely to work. Asking people to quarantine after travel is unnecessarily disruptive. There are schools and child care centers where visiting grandparents just over the state line requires a 7-day quarantine, whereas if they lived on this side, it wouldn’t. There is really no sense in that.

Instead, we should encourage kids to test before they return. In an ideal world, rapid COVID tests would be mailed to everyone’s homes and we would be encouraged to use them on the morning of school return after break. Something tells me that is not going to happen. But schools can still encourage and facilitate testing on return, and they should.

Rapid tests are extremely good at identifying contagious virus, and they can do so even in the contagious pre-symptomatic period. Rapid testing everyone before they return to school will identify the (hopefully small number of!) children with contagious COVID. And then it will not spread.