The Deployment of K-12 Classroom Testing to Open Schools

Even the conservative projections of the effects of COVID-19 are staggering. The hundreds of thousands of lives lost in America and the suffering of millions of people constitutes a scale of devastation unlike almost any other we have faced. When this human tragedy is combined with the economic cost, the scale of destruction is almost inconceivable. A pair of Harvard economists have estimated that the total economic cost of COVID-19 to the U.S. could reach $16 trillion — if the pandemic ends by Fall 2021. In comparison, China’s GDP for 2019 was a total of $14.5 trillion.

Forcing the economy open while COVID rampages is simply not an option. If there’s any hope for curtailing this destruction as we race to manufacture and distribute vaccines, it’s redoubling our efforts to contain viral spread as we rebuild our communities — this starts with getting our kids into in-person learning.

The adverse effects of continued school closure cannot be overstated. Students are suffering as a result of being kept home (with the impact on students disproportionately affecting underserved communities), and parents are struggling to keep up. In many communities, friction is building between parents, teachers, local government, and administrators. Yet, many school systems do not have robust plans to open and stay open safely. This is where a solution like regular classroom testing comes in — by testing students and staff regularly, frequently, and cheaply, school administrators and public health leaders are provided the data they need in order to make informed, risk-managed decisions about who to keep in school. Even after vaccines are made available to teachers, regular testing will provide an important extra layer of data for leaders seeking to curtail the spread of COVID-19 in their institutions.

In communities where frequent, repeated testing has been implemented, the results have been dramatic. Last fall, more than 100 colleges in Massachusetts, New York, Maine, and Vermont partnered with MIT’s Broad Institute to process over 45,000 COVID-19 tests a day. This proactive commitment to frequent testing — taken in combination with masking and social distancing protocols — appears to have helped minimize outbreaks and keep schools open.

This virus is deadly, and we should not underestimate its potential to wreak destruction, especially as infectious variants proliferate. Likewise, as the harms of closure mount, it’s imperative for us to consider the powerful tools we’ve developed to track and decrease the spread of COVID in a coordinated and informed way.

So the question becomes, how do we implement a regular testing strategy in K-12 schools nationwide, enabling us to reopen our critical educational institutions this Spring?

“In early January, Governor Charlie Baker announced that the Commonwealth would be the first State in the nation to offer regular testing to all K-12 students.”

Even as a federal strategy comes together, individual states — our proverbial laboratories of democracy — have begun to show what promising paths forward could look like. Take Massachusetts, for example — in early January, Governor Charlie Baker announced that the Commonwealth would be the first State in the nation to offer regular testing to all K-12 students. Massachusetts did this by instituting an initiative which includes a low-cost and large-scale testing approach called “group pooling”, testing kids and teachers in their own classrooms, once-per-week, for the same price as a fancy cup of coffee.

This weekly testing protocol is quick and simple. Students in a class self-swab their noses and the swabs are collected and pooled into one group test. As many as twenty-five swabs can be tested at once, keeping costs down while producing timely results (usually delivered within 24–48 hours). If the pooled test result is negative, then it is presumed that all those within the group are negative. If the result is positive, then members of the group can be re-tested individually and quarantined as necessary. Surveys have shown that this type of testing drastically improves teachers’ confidence in returning to the classroom, and experience proves that it’s easy for children to conduct.

At Ginkgo, it is our hope that by rolling out affordable and large-scale testing to reach every one of our communities, we can mitigate the dire costs of the pandemic sooner rather than later. We’ve borne witness to the destruction this virus has caused long enough. It’s time to take back control.