Regular Testing May Be the Best Way to Prevent COVID-19 Outbreaks at Schools

• Researchers say regular screening of students and employees is the best way to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks at schools.
• They say once a student or adult becomes symptomatic, it’s probably too late to prevent a spread of the disease.
• One expert, however, says testing can be cumbersome and expensive for schools, so masking and screening may be more prudent alternatives.

Regular monitoring of everyone in a school setting may be the only way to prevent outbreaks of COVID-19 in schools.

That’s the conclusion of a study published today in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.

Researchers reported that through a simulation, they determined that in cases of high transmission, actions such as closing down a classroom after a student was symptomatic were not enough to stop a large outbreak.

“We found that waiting until a student develops symptoms and tests positive is too slow a response, even though this was the method used in many jurisdictions to prevent COVID-19 transmission,” Paul Tupper, PhD, co-author of the study and a professor and director of the Cognitive Science Program at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, told Healthline.

“Screening students without symptoms works quite well in our model and could also be applied in workplaces or shared living accommodations,” he added.