State Must Expand Testing and Tracing to Reopen Schools Safely

You want school somewhere other than your kitchen table this fall? Then you better have lots of testing and contract tracing. Computer modeling from UK researchers published in The Lancet yesterday say that if UK schools reopen either full-time or every other week without big boosts in testing and contact tracing, they’ll trigger a second wave of coronavirus twice as bad as the first:

With increased levels of testing (between 59% and 87% of symptomatic people tested at some point during an active SARS-CoV-2 infection, depending on the scenario), and effective contact tracing and isolation, an epidemic rebound might be prevented. Assuming 68% of contacts could be traced, we estimate that 75% of individuals with symptomatic infection would need to be tested and positive cases isolated if schools return full-time in September, or 65% if a part-time rota system were used. If only 40% of contacts could be traced, these figures would increase to 87% and 75%, respectively. However, without these levels of testing and contact tracing, reopening of schools together with gradual relaxing of the lockdown measures are likely to induce a second wave that would peak in December, 2020, if schools open full-time in September, and in February, 2021, if a part-time rota system were adopted. In either case, the second wave would result in R rising above 1 and a resulting second wave of infections 2·0–2·3 times the size of the original COVID-19 wave. When infectiousness of children and young adults was varied from 100% to 50% of that of older ages, we still found that a comprehensive and effective test–trace–isolate strategy would be required to avoid a second COVID-19 wave [Jasmina Panovska-Griffiths et al., “Determining the Optimal Strategy for Reopening Schools, the Impact of Test and Trace Interventions, and the Risk of Occurreence of a Second Covid-19 Epidemic Wave in the UK: A Modeling Study,” The Lancet, 2020.08.03].

Republican leaders are heeling to the Governor’s hoarding urge and saying they don’t need to decide how to spend the bulk of our idle billion in federal coronavirus cash until winter. Why wait until our second wave of infections? Take a quarter of that money and hire 10,000 unemployed South Dakotans to work in contact tracing. Take another quarter to buy testing kits or set up our own testing kit factory. Don’t just sit there waiting for nature to take its course and our kids; do something that science says we need to do!