Have you sign-up for weekly asymptomatic testing at APS

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09/15/2021 16:08

Subject: Have you sign-up for weekly asymptomatic testing at APS

quote

Anonymous

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Also to emphasize a real life example from that article: “One private school in San Francisco with which we worked, and which gave us permission to share its experience — anonymously — has been open since October and has been testing all students and staff members monthly with saliva-based PCR tests; the school had performed more than 1,600 surveillance tests as of March 31. Only 10 came back positive, and eight were determined by clinical review and further testing to be false positives. Of the two true positive tests, one person had mild symptoms and another had a known exposure. In other words, the testing program did not identify any cases among teachers or students that would not have been picked up through ordinary symptom-based and contact-based screening.”

So show me where this surveillance testing has actually been proven effective in schools? Explain to me beyond the vagaries of that it “might prevent” spread why this is a good use of taxpayer funds, loss of learning time, etc?

Okay. How about this recent (8/1/2021) Lancet study on the cost savings achieved last year in at 93 K-12 schools and 18 universities throughout the country through a similar pooled surveillance program?

Surveillance testing was a factor in the early detection of asymptomatic infection and minimization of an outbreak risk. According to our data, a 0.3% positivity rate was observed after testing 253,406 samples. This amounts to 855 individuals identified early before a significant outbreak was observed. Although it would be difficult to estimate cost averted due to variability of positivity rate among asymptomatic populations, we estimated that these 855 individuals could potentially spread infection to 2.4 persons per day in a school setting [[22]]. In the absence of an early detection strategy (surveillance), this would lead to 2052 infected persons due to asymptomatic transmission. Out of these 2052 individuals, up to 25% (or 513 persons) may be symptomatic [[23]]. These persons would have required out-patient management at minimum, costing an average of $500–1000 for out-patient care, according to data released by Blue Cross Blue Shield [[24]]. Therefore, the costs averted for mild to moderate cases can be conservatively estimated to be between $256,500 and 513,000.

Furthermore, nearly 5% of symptomatic individuals (under 20 years old) have presented with severe to critical disease [[25],[26]], Thus nearly 26 individuals would have required hospitalization according to a FAIR Health Study, with the median cost of hospitalization ranging from a low of $34,662 for the 23–30 age group to a high of $45,683 for the 51–60 age group [[24]]. For those under 20 years of age, the average hospitalization cost was estimated at $68,261 and $77,323 for those over 60 years of age. Therefore, the cost averted for severe to critical cases was conservatively estimated to be $901,212 for our test population. These were the most conservative estimates of the cost averted by combining frequent surveillance testing (weekly) with prompt isolation/quarantine procedures in school and university setting. These estimates did not consider the worst-case scenario, where infection to older individuals within the school (teachers, principal) and outside of the school setting (parents, grandparents) would most likely have led to worse clinical outcome due to COVID-19.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00308-4/fulltext. The most conservative estimates to this study suggest that it ultimately prevented around 2052 additional people from becoming infected with Covid, and that this prevention saved well over $1million in medical costs, which may be a drastic underestimation as it does not consider potential effects from older individuals at the school or home (principals or grandparents) becoming infected and having worse clinical outcomes than those allowed for here. This cost analysis further makes no valuation of the monetary value of the continued health impairment caused caused by some Covid cases or the monetary value of the lives of any of the (again, conservatively estimated) 2,052 additional people who would have caught Covid from the 855 individuals identified early through this testing program. (But hey, to the anti-testers, that kind of preventable death is just what happens during an epidemic.)

The study appears to have been subsidized by a funding group so the cost of the testing itself is not given; however it is noted that it's the POOLING of the test results -- the thing that most parents who won't sign their kids up for it -- that makes the testing cheaper and cost effective to perform in bulk. In other words, the people who won't sign up their kids don't really want testing and will only sign up for it if it's the very expensive kind that will break the budget. Because again, they don't care about APS as a whole -- everything comes down to their own individual convenience. No surprise there.

The linked study indicates that this pooled testing program was done over twenty weeks between August, 2020 and January 2021. Isn't that before the vast majority of these 2052 people who would have caught covid could have been vaccinated? You've characterized this as a recent study- I see that it was recently published, but I'm not quite understanding why these results are applicable to a testing program conducted in Arlington in school year 2021-22, particularly given the vaccination rates in this area.