State needs to increase virus testing in schools

On March 9, 2020, the front page of The Hartford Courant was topped with this headline: “First resident tests positive.”

It’s now six months, 54,000 cases and nearly 4,500 deaths later.

Connecticut and its residents have made remarkable progress in tamping down the spread of COVID-19, but now, with schools open again, a strong resurgence is possible if not likely. The state must be prepared to deal with it.

Connecticut has had some of the lowest positive-test rates in the nation — less than 1% — but those numbers ticked up slightly in recent days, mostly because of small gatherings, according to the state Department of Public Health. Small fluctuations are to be expected, and a few days’ worth of slightly increased numbers is not enough to go full red-alert.

But it is a good warning.

The reopening of schools has opened a vector that we haven’t dealt with in six months. Even with social-distancing protocols in place and entire systems of education rewritten and rewired in a matter of weeks, there will be gaps in the protections. Experts have predicted that school reopenings will lead to more cases.

Our children, and their germs, are mingling. There’s just no way around it. We can plan to minimize contact and contain outbreaks, but there’s only so much we can do. The coronavirus will spread.

Consider the case in Meriden, where a parent sent their child to school even though the child wasn’t feeling well. That child later tested positive for COVID-19, and an entire cohort within the school is now under a two-week quarantine.

Many other towns have had similar situations or reports of positive cases to deal with in the first days of the school year, including Naugatuck, Durham, Somers, Middletown, Waterbury, Glastonbury, Plainville, Newington, Washington, Cornwall, Coventry, Monroe and Norwalk.

It’s a clear reminder that the virus is still with us, and that without constant vigilance, it could sweep the state again.

The state has offered some guidance for schools but is largely leaving it up to local districts to determine how best to proceed when a case or two is exposed. That makes sense; administrators at the local level have a much better handle on what needs to be done in their schools than the state.

But how do schools find out that a child is positive? Schools do not test students. That responsibility falls to the parents. When a child does test positive, it’s up to the local health district to inform the schools.

Health districts are already burdened by contact tracing, and many have expressed serious concerns that they won’t have the staff available to keep up.

That means it could be days from when a child begins to feel unwell, to when their parents decide the child should be tested, to when the test results come back, to when the local health district is notified, to when the health district notifies the school. Parents could also let schools know directly when their child has tested positive.

Complicating matters is the fact that studies show that children can be very effective asymptomatic spreaders of the disease. That means the Meriden student, for example, might not have been the first student in the classroom to catch the disease — just that they were the first to show symptoms.

Given the increase in school-related cases, state officials should strongly consider whether to provide regular testing for every public school in Connecticut.

Recent advances in COVID-19 testing make widespread, inexpensive rapid testing a real possibility.

State officials should look into the feasibility. At only a few dollars per test, it’s plausible that a sample of students in each school could be tested regularly so that the schools would have a head-start on outbreaks and containment.

If we’re not capable of catching the coronavirus early in school settings, then it’s just a matter of time before it spreads there and leaks into the broader community.

That could put us back where we were six months ago: poorly prepared and locking down.