Children's National Hospital message to DCPS parents

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I find it ironic that Children’s National doesn’t want to help test public school kids when they have several large private school contracts for which they are making a hefty profit AND their former board chair is Biden’s COVID czar.

I'm sure they'd love to help test public school kids, but they don't have unlimited capacity. The city is literally giving out free rapid tests that kids can take at home; you don't need to go to Children's for that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes, it's a waste of resources to demand that every child get tested to be allowed to return to school. This is another case of the mayor giving in to unreasonable union demands. The union is pushing for metrics for # of positive cases to close schools and wants this data to close schools. Experts say the most important metrics are number of hospitalizations and deaths, not number of cases. Yet the union continues to fear monger about number of cases.

I'm so angry that the union keeps harming children and those who actually are more vulnerable to dying from covid despite being vaccinated. Do some actual risk management and consider all the impacts of covid on society, not just union members' irrational feelings.

No, it's not an unreasonable union demand. Testing to return actually makes overall closure LESS likely, because it screens out a good share of the people who are actively contagious for covid. That means both a reduction in the likelihood of having covid spread in the school (which is good for keeping school open) and a higher bar for arguing to close the schools just as a preventive measure. If you want school open (and I know I do!), you should be all for testing, the more, the better.

I agree. If it were feasible to rapid test the kids twice a week or more, I'd be all for it. Screen out the positives = reduce spread in schools = schools will have an easier time staying open. Even if you don't catch everyone, exponential spread means that every case you do catch heads off many more.

I don't think schools should be closed based on case rates, but only based on whether or not they can staff the schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Sorry, of all the reasons not to test, reserving capacity for the unvaccinated is at the bottom of my list

"The unvaccinated," in general, may belong at the bottom of your list. But the unvaccinated who are patients of Children's are surely mostly too young to be vaccinated.

The point is that surveillance testing children to allow schools to open is a reasonable use of tests. Not testing kids because you're "saving" the tests for willfully unvaccinated adults is stupid. (Also, I'd guess that many patients at Children's are vaccine-eligible, because any kid over the age of four is eligible.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:First, I don't know why people would go to them anyway when they got clear instructions they can pick up tests at any school.
Second, there is no such thing as unnecessary testing because for every vaccinated person who tests, if they catch a positive and change their behavior, they are breaking the chain of infection to more vulnerable people.

That would only be true if test weren't a limited resource:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/01/covid-test-shortage/621149/

The idiot author wants tests reserved for the unvaccinated. They put themselves in a position that makes them vulnerable, there is no reason to expend limited resources on them

I agree, that article is asinine. My entire family is vaccinated, booster where eligible except the under 5s. On Christmas Eve we tested 25 family members with rapid tests and one of the was positive (vaccinated 8 YO) so that family didn’t join the gathering. The alternative would have been to to see each other at all or to potentially risk infecting a few parents in their 80s or not gather. None of us had any qualms about using rapid tests that had been purchased when they were in easy supply to test for a gathering.

The thing about proposals like this is that sometimes the right thing to do in terms of social health and safety issues is that sometimes the most logical and effective thing to do goes against "common sense" and most especially morality. We often prefer policies that punish the deserving, even if they're objectively less effective social policies. These kinds of proposals are often met with moral outrage. Unfortunately, the people who communicate these proposals often don't do much to prevent this.

This. Yes, it makes sense for your family to test everyone before having a 25-person gathering during Omicron (which is a choice to begin with). But the author is right that the *public* health benefit of that is marginal at best. So if everybody with means uses tests all the time for even lesser gatherings than a special occasion, it will affect test supply and lab return times for more crucial uses. "You are the traffic."

[Anonymous]

Why hasn't the CDC changed the guidelines for a 5 day quarantine for schools?