Thread by @WhitneyEpi

Am I living in bizarro world?!

🧵 So..US POTUS & Senate have refused to give K-12 schools $$$ for #SARSCoV2 testing for school safety: “You’re on yr own!” 🤯

So district in big Democratic city comes up w $$$ itself to do spot testing with parental consent (hats off, NYC!)..1/

https://twitter.com/HighWireTalk/status/1318722805081538560

So THEN someone in our “You’re on yr own” US executive says, “Actually I do have some thoughts!”

and bullies the actual *CDC* (the home of elite force of disease detectives who live to identify and squash outbreaks) into saying...2/

“Hey school districts, in case you were thinking about doing the extraordinary & forward-thinking work of standing up a whole #SARSCoV2 surveillance system in your K-12 schools bc yr federal govt has abandoned you...3/

“...randomly spot-testing for #SARSCoV2 the kids whose families choose in-person learning” If you were thinking of doing this totally sensible spread-reducing thing that’s been done in many other countries, STOP IT! It’s “UNETHICAL!”

Forgive me but I’m deeply confused. See... last night I read a CDC report that almost 300,000 extra people have died in the US just in the past 7-8 months (bc of limited testing & public health support).
And I found THAT “unethical”. Maybe we’re just using the word differently..

And here’s the link to the document. The big thrust is POTUS’s theme of discouraging surveillance testing of people without symptoms - even though we know presymptomatic people are a MAJOR route of #SARSCoV2 spread & kids more likely to be a symptomatic cdc.gov/coronavirus/20…

They are actually working *against* all of us who want to lower transmission 😞

Also I so feel for the career CDC people who have to help out these documents together. These are literally people who’ve trained their whole adult lives to LOWER disease transmission. I just can’t...