COVID testing in schools is smart

The Wolf administration announced a plan to provide free testing in K-12schools, statewide, this fall.

It’s one of the smartest moves by state government in a long time. On-site testing for the COVID-19 virus will be available at schools across the commonwealth this year.

The Wolf administration announced a partnership with a company to provide free COVID-19 testing in K-12 schools, statewide, this fall. And the state Department of Health has ordered that vaccine providers support COVID-19 vaccination clinics at K-12 schools as well as at colleges and universities. The tab for these initiatives will be covered by federal stimulus money and there couldn’t be a better use of the funds.

An agreement — for $87 million — is with Boston-based Concentric by Ginkgo Bioworks, also known as Ginkgo.

This move is for the good of all. At present, children under the age of 12 still cannot receive the COVID-19 vaccine. The virus is spreading. Incomprehensibly, masking at schools is being debated and resisted. It is a situation ripe for positive diagnoses. And the sooner the school, the student and the parent know of a positive test, the sooner action can be taken to forestall spread.

Ginkgo uses a testing method that combines anterior nasal swab samples from consenting individuals in a classroom and runs them as a single test, which allows many students to be checked for the virus. The testing is intended to be self-administered by students but overseen by support staff. Test results are expected in a day or two. If a pool comes back positive for COVID-19, follow-up testing would occur to determine which student or students were infected.

According to the state Department of Health, Ginkgo operates statewide programs in many places including Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Arizona, and North Carolina. The program already was piloted in Pennsylvania and is immediately accepting signups from schools and districts.

This is a great opportunity for families and schools. Buy-in should be uncomplicated. Districts should embrace the onsite testing and parents should gratefully get behind the initiative.

— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/ The Associated Press

Overdosing on politics

Pennsylvania ranks fifth among the states in overdose deaths and the overdose death rate, but legislative majorities in both houses have not detected an ongoing public health emergency in those grim statistics.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 4,377 Pennsylvanians died in 2020 from unintentional drug overdoes, with more than 75% due to opioids. The death rate for the year was 35.6-per100,000 residents.

Yet the politics-addicted Republican majorities in both houses recently found it more important to counter Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf than to agree to his request to extend the state’s public health emergency regarding opioids.

Republican leaders, who have given high priority to a needless and useless “forensic audit” of the state’s 2020 presidential election, said they will take up comprehensive opioid policy when they return to Harrisburg at the end of September after an eight-week hiatus.

They did not explain why extending the emergency — which had produced highly positive results before the COVID-19 pandemic reversed them — and their impending legislative approach should be mutually exclusive given the urgency that the addiction crisis requires.

To lawmakers’ credit, they responded aggressively when Wolf first declared the opioid public health emergency in January 2018. The state government quickly lifted restrictions on the distribution of the opioid antidote naloxone, worked with the medical community to revise opioid prescription standards, developed a highly effective statewide system by which doctors and pharmacists could track prescriptions and prevent “doctor-shopping,” and increased treatment access.

But they responded to Wolf’s management of the COVID-19 crisis by passing two constitutional amendments, and timing required statewide referendums for the low-turnout spring primary, to transfer emergency management from the executive branch, where it belongs, to themselves.

Today, on International Overdose Awareness Day, opioid addiction and overdoses remain a public health emergency even if the Legislature won’t acknowledge it as such.

When lawmakers meander back to the Capitol they should give higher priority to that emergency than to their political dogand-pony show regarding the well-settled 2020 election.

— Scranton Times-Tribune/The Associated Press