Thread by @safeschoolsny

What's the spirit of @CDCgov's K-12 quarantine rules, you ask? It's a bit different from the letter. Check out @CDCDirector's testimony before an @USSenate hearing in July.
"CDC recommends schools implement layered prevention strategies to protect people
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who are not fully vaccinated, including students, teachers, staff, and other members of their
households. ...vaccination for children and adults ages 12 and up, the correct use of masks, physical distancing, handwashing & respiratory etiquette,
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cleaning & maintaining healthy facilities (including proper ventilation), & contact tracing, in combination with screening testing, isolation, and quarantine for those exposed and not vaccinated."
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Seems like she's saying she wants students quarantined that might have been exposed. We want that too. #COVIDisAirborne "For airborne transmission, social distancing in indoor spaces is not enough, and may provide a false sense of security,”-- @BazantMartin 4/

Remember when smoking was allowed in bars & how it built up in the air, @NYCMayor? That's our kids' classrooms. Some of the smoke might be filtered out by purifiers, but C-19 aerosols are not like the dust that lingered only around Pigpen. Case in class = all could be exposed.
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.@NYCMayor saw way too many closures & applied the absolute wrong solution -- one that puts more kids at risk and creates more opportunities for spread.
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.@RWalensky again "If it is not possible to maintain adequate physical distancing, it is especially important that schools layer multiple other prevention strategies, such as masking & screening testing, to help ensure that no students need be excluded frm in-person learning."
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What's screening?
"Screening tests are intended to identify unvaccinated people w/C-19 who are asymptomatic & do not have known, suspected, or reported exposure... Screening helps to identify...cases so that measures can be taken to prevent further transmission." -- @CDCgov
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Basically the goal here is to screen out as much COVID as possible. You test a large percentage of people weekly or bi-weekly. You do a baseline before school starts. You are doing all you can to isolate infected people and stop any chance of spread.
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What's surveilance testing?
"Public health surveillance testing is intended to monitor community- or population-level outbreaks of disease, or to characterize the incidence and prevalence of disease." -- -- @CDCgov
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This kind of testing is about getting a sense of how much Covid might be in the community. You might pick up a case here and there, but as we have seen it's not going to be that many. In fact you will know that screening is working when you are picking up more cases.
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As an example, we had 592 student cases last week (reported by the Situation Room) only 75 were picked up by in school testing (12%).
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.@NYCMayor has not announced how much testing he's going to do. @UFT, is not demanding all students and staff be tested every week, but they should be. Our schools will #NotBeSafeEnough until this is done.
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https://twitter.com/safeschoolsny/status/1438514085411188746?s=20

Not bi-weekly, twice weekly.