Our most precious resource is about to go back to school in the middle of a pandemic.

The Things You Need to Think About Before You Reopen Schools

I’m not saying you should or should not. All I’m saying is that you better dot your T’s and cross your I’s.

I’d like to start off this blog post by telling you that I am in no way advocating for or against reopening schools. This is currently a hot-button issue, and many policymakers are scratching their heads on how to do school reopening correctly. I am also not telling any one person or group how schools should reopen. I just want to tell you a few things that you need to know as we move toward that moment when they do reopen.

In 2009, when the H1N1 influenza pandemic happened, we were lucky because we had the tests for the virus rather quickly. Even if we couldn’t identify the H1N1 novel influenza virus itself, PCR analyzers could tell us that they detected an influenza virus but couldn’t tell what subtype it was. With coronavirus, things are different. PCR analyzers spat out a negative-to-all-known-viruses result early in the epidemic, so it was hard to identify cases.

Now, we are going into a phase of unintended consequences of laboratory testing. It’s not that we have enough tests; we probably don’t. It’s that we have many different types of tests. There are the PCR tests that detect the virus’ genetic material…