Virginia to test students, staff for COVID-19
Pilot program will give schools rapid results on possible infections
RICHMOND — Virginia is launching a new program to test students and staff in schools for COVID-19.
The pilot program will provide interested schools with rapid tests that can provide results in as little as 15 minutes through the end of the school year. Schools can use them to for regular weekly tests and for people with symptoms or in close contact with a case.
It will be followed by a broader program that the state plans to implement this summer and fall, according to Dr. Laurie Forlano, deputy commissioner for population health. Regular testing could help prevent outbreaks in schools.
Forlano also thinks the tests could help build confidence for in-school learning. Gov. Ralph Northam signed legislation last week that will require schools to have full-time, in-person school in fall.
“I know testing is not required to be in-person in the fall,” Forlano said, “but I do think it will help identify those cases earlier, to limit the impact on a given school.”
Virginia’s program is not unique — other schools and states have had testing programs since the fall.
The RAND Corporation did a study of school testing programs funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The study was led by physician and policy researcher Laura Faherty and policy researcher Benjamin Master.
They say that when implemented, testing programs make people feel safer and help isolate asymptomatic cases. But largescale programs are complicated and require plenty of resources — part of why Virginia has spent months planning its program.
“We don’t want to convey the message that this is just beyond impossible. I think the opposite is true,” said Faherty, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Boston University School of Medicine. “It’s very possible; it has a lot of benefits. And it is quite a heavy lift.”
The state also hopes the tests will give better information about the spread of COVID-19 in schools, which has been relatively low in Virginia.
As of Thursday, there were 229 outbreaks in schools, according to the Virginia Department of Health’s outbreak dashboard. There are three reported ongoing outbreaks at Hampton Roads public schools: Hickory
High School in Chesapeake and Kempsville High School and Princess Anne Elementary School in Virginia Beach.
Most school districts in the region have some kind of online dashboard, although how they report data varies. Some, like Chesapeake, only report a few weeks of data. In others, like Newport News, data lags behind when cases are reported by days or weeks.
Chesapeake’s dashboard lists 44 cases over the past two weeks as of Thursday. Virginia Beach reported 591 cases since the start of school; Newport News reported 219; Hampton reported 90 and Norfolk reported 27.
Master said in the schools with screening tests, about 44% of all reported cases were caught. Those cases were mostly asymptomatic and might not have been detected otherwise.
Some districts that started testing programs in the fall had dashboards showing how many asymptomatic cases they caught, which helped reassure family and staff that cases weren’t going undetected. Data from Massachusetts, which has a statewide program similar to what Virginia hopes to start this year, indicated parents and teachers felt more comfortable after testing started.
“Returning to school is stressful and anxiety-provoking for many different reasons, and this is one more way that the whole school community can be reassured,” Faherty said.
Many of the Abbott BinaxNOW rapid tests that Virginia has on hand are from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Additionally, Virginia is set to receive about $250 million from the federal government specifically for school testing.
Forlano said they’d already been planning a school testing pilot program, but the extra funding helped shift their focus to a larger-scale program that will use pooled tests, similar to the program in Massachusetts.
Instead of testing individuals separately, schools would test a group of samples, such as from a whole classroom or sports team. If the group of tests came back positive, they’d follow up with rapid tests, or the slower but more accurate PCR tests. It’s cheaper and more efficient than PCR tests for each person.
“Obviously, we’re testing a lot of people right now for COVID, so it helps with throughput and efficiency in a setting like this,” Forlano said.
Several school districts have told the state they’re interested in the pilot program, but there are a few hurdles schools face before they can start testing.
Schools will need to identify a healthcare partner, get a waiver to allow them to analyze the rapid tests and develop a plan of who will administer the tests.
Results would be uploaded through the VDH’s reporting portal, and schools will need plans in place for when students test positive.
The RAND report found that some of the schools with the most success had a dedicated partnership with a healthcare provider.
“We did find schools could figure this out on their own and use their own staff and their own resources, but it is much easier if you’re going to scale this up to have some kind of external provider who specializes in this,” Master said.
Schools will also need to get consent from parents and staff. Virginia’s program will be voluntary — the VDH has provided some sample consent forms, although they expect some schools to create their own.
Participation was one of the major barriers that schools faced when they tried testing programs this fall. Schools that had some of the highest participation, the RAND researchers found, spent a lot of time addressing community concerns and came up with incentives to encourage families to opt-in.
“We hope people are interested in participating, because the testing programs are only as valuable as they are interested,” Forlano said. “You need people to people to participate and be willing to be tested on a regular basis. That’s going to be the key.”