LAUSD's Pending Covid Testing Disaster
LAUSD's Covid testing plan will be a logistical nightmare and will leave thousands of students stranded.
Last week, LAUSD announced they will require all students and staff to undergo weekly Covid testing regardless of vaccination status, including baseline testing before most schools start August 16th.
While most of the reporting since then has focused on the policy’s invasiveness or if it will help families feel safer, very little attention has been given to the train wreck we are about to witness.
First, let’s talk numbers. LAUSD has approximately 75,000 staff and 600,000 students. This means an additional 675,000 Covid tests will need to be administered, processed, and reported on each week. In Los Angeles county, which has a population of just over 10 million, approximately 350,000 tests were processed the last week of July. LAUSD’s required testing will increase Los Angeles county’s testing by 192% to over one million tests each week!
At its peak in January, when Los Angeles county had 838,000 weekly tests, the state struggled to meet demand and had massive delays. With LAUSD’s testing plan, Los Angeles county would peak at an estimated 1,040,000 tests by the third week in August, which is 24% more tests than ever conducted in Los Angeles county.
In California, approximately 1,110,000 tests were conducted the last week of July. LAUSD’s testing alone would increase California’s tests by 61%. This sudden increase in testing, especially concentrated in just a few labs, will be nearly impossible to achieve in just two weeks.
Now, let’s talk about time. LAUSD plans to have mobile testing units on campuses for 6.5 hours a days. Assuming these mobile testing units will operate five days a week, they would need to conduct 346 tests per minute. Assuming each test takes 5 minutes, LAUSD would need to have 1,730 contractors administering these tests at any given moment during those 6.5 hours.
What about cost? LAUSD is paying $20-$30 per test depending on if a saliva or nasal swab PCR test is used. Splitting the difference on each type’s cost, that is $16,875,000 per week. If this testing is conducted throughout the entire year, it would cost about $675,000,000, or $1,125 per student.
This testing plan might sound like a nightmare already, especially since LAUSD came up with the plan with less than three weeks before school starts, but it gets worse.
Some LAUSD charter schools that started this week are already having issues. Tests have not come back and kids are being turned away from school for lack of a negative test result.
In the spring, LAUSD also required testing, but the situation was very different. First, fewer students were on campus. Because of the inconvenience with the hybrid schedule and low-quality in-person instruction offered, only 7% of high school students returned for in-person in the spring, 12% of middle school, and 30% of elementary. This equates to about only 110,000 students. Second, the testing frequency was only every two weeks. Including staff, this means approximately 92,500 tests would have been conducted each week.
Even with a fraction of the tests conducted in the spring compared to what is planned for fall, many students didn’t get tested on time and were excluded from campus. In the spring, these students had zoom instruction as a fallback. That option doesn’t exist today.
Another key difference from the spring is that in-person was opt-in. Parents actively chose to return knowing the testing protocols. By default, these are also parents that pay closer attention to school communications.
For this fall, in-person is the default and parents must opt-in to independence study. It wouldn’t be suspiring if a large portion of LAUSD families are not aware their children will be excluded from campus if they don’t get a Covid test on-time. This could lead to thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of kids being excluded from campus.
If getting Covid tests back on-time was a struggle when only a handful of charter schools opened and certainly was a struggle this past winter, what happens when all of LAUSD schools open and a large number of tests are not returned? It’s very possible tens of thousands, if not over a hundred thousand, of students don’t get timely test results. What then?
What happens when a teacher doesn’t get a test result on-time or simply didn’t get a test? Will that teacher be turned away? Will they be able to find a substitute? Will the teacher expect to get paid?
Even if these impossible logistical hurdles are overcome, two major issues lingering are that of false positives and if these testing measures do any good.
A significant issue is the number of false positives which could be 90%. Tracy Beth Hoeg, epidemiologist and associate physician researcher at the University of California, Davis, also concluded screening testing (like LAUSD is planning) is largely ineffective. Much of the time, any true positives would have been identified through symptom-based and contact-based screening, both of which LAUSD is already doing.
If the spring testing program gives any indication of what to expect with the upcoming baseline testing, we should not be surprised to see a high amount of positive tests and plenty of false positives.
In April, 72 out of the approximately 75,000 staff tests came back positive and 105 out of the 110,000 student tests came back positive. Combined, they had 96 cases per 100,000 people. Oddly, this looks extremely high when compare to Los Angeles county’s case rate on April 19th which was only 3.6 cases per 100,000 residents. This certainly is indicative of a very high false positive rate. What was also odd is every LAUSD staff had adequate time to be fully vaccinated by April 19th, yet their Covid rates were very similar to the students’ rate, none of which were vaccinated.
Today, weekly Covid cases in Los Angeles county are about 6.5 times that of weekly cases back in April. Should we expect to see about 450 staff and 4,000 students test positive? Could the vast majority of those results be false positive, unnecessarily excluding thousands of kids from campus and causing needless panic in the community? Could the true positive cases have been screened just as easily through other methods LAUSD is currently applying without costing $16,875,000 per week?
LAUSD’s testing rollout will be a disaster. The chaotic return to in-person school and preventable disruptions to their education will cause harm to countless school children after a year of sub-par remote learning. With the size and severity of the issues, I would have expected someone at LAUSD to have considered them. Perhaps they did and perhaps they know full-well the train wreck they put in motion.
Very well written and objective article. It reads like true journalism. Excellent work!! Please, we need more of the truth presented so professionally.
DoctorNow you need to wake up. CT’s above 25 almost guarantee false positives. You should lose your lab license.