The Trump administration said Thursday that it does not recommend that universities require students to be tested for COVID-19 before returning to campus this fall.
“In general, evaluating people before going back to college … is not a strategy we recommend, nor does the CDC recommend, because you are only negative at the moment,” Admiral Brett Giroir, assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services who is in charge of the COVID-19 test strategy, told reporters.
“It could be positive the next day and it doesn’t alleviate the responsibility of wearing a mask and doing all those kinds of things,” he added.
Universities across the country are taking various approaches to testing for coronaviruses. Some require exams for students before they arrive on campus, while others plan to test them after arrival. Some schools say they plan to regularly evaluate students and staff.
Giroir said schools should use surveillance tests that would only test a random percentage of students. That could be done through group testing, Giroir said, in which samples from several people are combined and then tested together rather than individually.
Positive group tests are followed by individual tests for everyone in the group, while negative group tests are erased.
“Nothing is a perfect solution, but it is not a burden on the healthcare system. It allows universities to keep control of how they want to do it, ”he said.
The US testing system is becoming increasingly tense, with response times to make results longer as demand grows.
Giroir emphasized that needs may be different for universities at critical points.
“A lot depends on what the rates are in the community and the specific demographics of your university,” he said.
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