Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness

November 5, 2020

Testing the waters: is it time to go back to school? Diagnostic screening as a COVID‐19 risk‐mitigation strategy for reopening schools in King County, WA

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  • [Pre-print, not peer-reviewed] Modeling of K-12 school reopening in King County, Washington found that if in-school countermeasures are observed, diagnostic screening either with PCR tests or rapid antigen tests may be of little benefit due to a higher rate of false positive tests in this low prevalence setting. Modeled in-school countermeasures included daily symptom screening, contact tracing, face masks, hand hygiene, improved ventilation, and physical distancing. Countermeasures could reduce the 3-month cumulative incidence to 2% or less for students, teachers, and staff. In this setting, school-based transmission was also found to be a limited driver of community spread, holding the effective reproduction number Re = 1 over 3 months.

Klein et al. (Nov 5, 2020). Testing the waters: is it time to go back to school? Diagnostic screening as a COVID‐19 risk‐mitigation strategy for reopening schools in King County, WA. Institute for Disease Modeling. Downloaded Nov. 5 from https://covid.idmod.org/data/Testing_the_waters_time_to_go_back_to_school.pdf