COVID-19 Confusion
There’s a wide range of “best-practices” on how to deal with COVID in your school. Unfortunately, some of these practices appear to conflict with the recommendations of health authorities.
The confusion over best practices was born, not from the negligence of school leaders, but from the rapidly changing environment of COVID-19.
Dr. Mario Ramirez, an emergency medicine physician and former Director at the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Pandemic and Emerging threats, was interviewed for the Oct. 7 edition of Education Week on how to keep COVID-19 out of your school. He touched on the following topics:
Testing: After being exposed to someone with COVID-19, you should get tested but not do it the same day or the next day.
“The false-negative testing rate for tests that are done the first 24 hours after an exposure are somewhere around 80 – 100 percent. You need at least three days before your test has any kind of meaningful accuracy,” Dr. Ramirez said.
This means that parents should test their students three days after a suspected exposure.
Temperature checks: Are of limited use and schools may want to reassess the workload it creates, when balanced against their efficacy for detecting COVID-19.
“There’s not good evidence that that’s really helpful… it has’t been shown to effectively screen out people who are infected,” he said.
“The NIH [National Institutes for Health]: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases where Dr. [Anthony] Fauci works actually discontinued temperature checks for people going into their office. So if that guy doesn’t think they’re valid, they’re probably really not valid for schools either,” Ramirez said.
Airflow and air filters: Dr. Ramirez said that the most important thing is “keeping air moving through the building in a meaningful way.” When it comes to filters, however, “there’s still a lot of uncertainty about what the right filtration is.”
Vaccines: “I think it’s critically important for people to get the flu vaccine this year,” Ramirez said, adding that a COVID-19 vaccine will raise issues about schools being used as vaccination sites. He predicts that discussion to begin in April or May.
