My kid’s elementary school has been doing routine weekly COVID pool tests of each class since last spring (this is Massachusetts, USA). I don’t think it’s “insane”. It’s not the kind of test that goes way up your nose, it’s the anterior one, the one that feels like picking your nose. It takes a few minutes once a week, the school nurse goes around and does it, and AFAICT none of the kids care at all. I think of this as an extremely-low-cost intervention that meaningfully reduces the chance of within-school transmission / outbreaks.
I’m less blasé about unvaccinated kids catching COVID than Zvi is, but I would like to think that we can put aside our differences and say “Yes, let’s do extremely-low-cost interventions when we can!”
It seems like it matters a lot what they do with the test results. If they end up compiling some statistics about COVID prevalence, or if they binary-search positive results in the pool to narrow down which kids had COVID, those could be reasonable things that warrant the testing and might not cost much. If they end up quarantining the whole classroom for a week or two when the pool tests positive, then it cost a lot.
My kid’s elementary school has been doing routine weekly COVID pool tests of each class since last spring (this is Massachusetts, USA). I don’t think it’s “insane”. It’s not the kind of test that goes way up your nose, it’s the anterior one, the one that feels like picking your nose. It takes a few minutes once a week, the school nurse goes around and does it, and AFAICT none of the kids care at all. I think of this as an extremely-low-cost intervention that meaningfully reduces the chance of within-school transmission / outbreaks.
I’m less blasé about unvaccinated kids catching COVID than Zvi is, but I would like to think that we can put aside our differences and say “Yes, let’s do extremely-low-cost interventions when we can!”
It seems like it matters a lot what they do with the test results. If they end up compiling some statistics about COVID prevalence, or if they binary-search positive results in the pool to narrow down which kids had COVID, those could be reasonable things that warrant the testing and might not cost much. If they end up quarantining the whole classroom for a week or two when the pool tests positive, then it cost a lot.