Is Testing Students for COVID Feasible? – Inside Higher Ed
Diagnostic testing is part of every college’s plan for reopening campus. But whether college administrations can get their hands on enough tests, or afford them, is still being worked out.
Test and trace, test and trace, test and trace.
So goes nearly every college announcement that campus will be open for students in the fall.
“We intend to know as much as possible about the viral health status of our community,” Mitch Daniels, Purdue University’s president, wrote in a letter to the campus community announcing an intention to reopen. “It will include a robust testing system during the school year.”
“Testing is an absolute prerequisite,” wrote Brown University president Christina Paxson in a New York Times op-ed. “All campuses must be able to conduct rapid testing for the coronavirus for all students, when they first arrive on campus and at regular intervals throughout the year.”
The American College Health Association included in guidelines to institutions that a “return to an active on-campus environment will depend upon widespread testing, contact tracing and isolation/quarantine of ill and exposed individuals both on campus and in the community.”
But can colleges get access to the those diagnostic tests, or even afford them? The answer is complicated.