Lots of discussion in NY today about whether or not @NYGovCuomo is hinting that schools will require frequent testing of students in conjunction with opening. Let’s remember what testing can & cannot do. (1/x) https://twitter.com/13wham/status/1290780666972577793

The testing we are talking about is for active disease, the nose swab. Antibody testing, the blood test, doesn’t play a role here.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/testing.html (2/x)

Here’s the trick, no test is perfect and a lot goes in to interpreting the results. There are false negatives, meaning the test is incorrectly false. Presymptomatic people are more likely to have a false negative test as well. (3/x)

We need to ask ourselves what we want the testing to do. I think we are all desperate for a safe way to fully reopen schools & we hear about the need for more testing and we think surely if we just test everyone a lot that will help. But what will it help? (4/x)

Yes, we might find a few that are asymptomatic & truly positive. It would be great to catch those. However, it won’t change all the other things we still need to do such as physically space & wear masks. A school full of negative tests still doesn’t look like school in Fall 2019.

So, are there some people that the benefit of periodic testing outweighs the costs/risks? Probably. Is there a way we can fully open schools right now without any significant changes? No, not yet. (6/x)

Parents, I think what we want is for our children to be safe and school to be safe, for everyone. We want Covid over and we want normal again. Science/evidence based policy will get us there but random widespread testing isn’t it. (7/7)