Memphis launches new strategy for widespread testing at schools

At least two Memphis schools will be regularly tested for COVID-19 upon returning to the classroom later this August under a new testing program with the city, leaders have said. 

The program will "pool" samples from several students into one tube that is then tested for presence of the virus, said Dr. Manoj Jain, an infectious disease physician who has been advising local leaders throughout the pandemic. The method makes more efficient use of testing resources in identifying potential cases among a population, leaders explained. 

"It is my prediction — I'm not a doctor," Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland said Wednesday, "but I think at some point before we have a widely distributed vaccine, every school, from prekindergarten all the way through graduate school will be involved (in pool testing) if they're doing in-person instruction."

Jain said he believed the same. 

Jain:Safely open Tennessee's schools by 'pool testing' students

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Schools across the city are eligible to partake in the program, Strickland and Tiffany Collins, who is leading the program, said Wednesday. Collins is the deputy director of general services for the city, which is using federal funding from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act to support the testing endeavor. 

For now, Strickland said, funding is not a limiting factor. The city has the capacity to test 4,000 students and teachers each day with the pool testing program, and so far, two schools have signed on for testing of students and teachers. Poplar Healthcare and ADL labs have been approved to run pool tests, leaders said.

Public charter schools in the city are eligible to use the program for free, Strickland said, and private schools can have the logistics assistance from the city but will be asked to pay for the tests themselves, he said. The city will add schools on a first-come, first-serve basis until they hit the testing capacity limit, he said. 

Collins has also spoken to organizations running "student hubs" or locations where students can do virtual learning outside the classroom, she explained.

For the two unnamed schools who have decided to implement the program, testing will begin within the next week, she said, in advance of start dates on Aug. 24 and Aug. 31, respectively. Some teachers have already been tested, Collins said. 

Students and staff will be tested the week before returning and then in 8-to-10-day intervals afterward.  

"My recommendation to them, and I'm not a doctor, is we want to be able to test children more than twice a month, but we know that the with the resources we have we cannot do it every day or every week," Collins said. "So we're working towards every 10 business days which would ideally give each child and the staff the opportunity to test at least three times a month."

Jain said frequency will also be dependent upon positivity rates. 

Pool testing, the three explained, is another method for mitigating the spread of the virus. For schools, if one of the tests — representative of samples of several students of teachers — were to come back positive, then the students would go into quarantine for exposure and be retested to determine positive cases, which would go into isolation, Jain explained. 

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"What it does is it allows us another tool, which is what we're looking for," Jain said of the testing program. "We've got to find other new tools that will make things safer for our children, for our workforce for others to get back to our usual day to day activities."

The program was developed with Shelby County Schools in mind, Strickland said. The district, which serves more than 100,000 students and is one of the largest local employers, decided to begin the school year virtually on Aug. 31 after initially presenting parents with the choice of virtual or in-person learning. (Those choices will be honored when the district does reopen, SCS has said.) 

Once the district decided in later July for its traditional schools to go virtual, Strickland said, the city changed course to offer pool testing to other schools in the city.

Jain said he believes pool testing could provide a pathway for SCS to know when to reopen. 

Testing, he had previously explained, provides more data. 

"There is no way to tell if a given school will have a few or a lot of potential cases, compared to the other place," he said. "The only best way we have is testing." 

As the cultural acceptance of masking has changed in recent weeks — and can, in part, be credited to some improvement of the city and county's cases numbers — Jain also hopes the culture around testing can improve. It would be a benefit to the city to do more testing to understand the prevalence of the virus within a particular population. 

More:This SCS teacher had COVID-19. Here's what she hopes to see before schools reopen again

"I don't believe people really understand the broad implications and the benefits of testing. Just like we didn't understand the implications and benefits of masking," he said. "It took us a little while, but now we know and we really have seen the impact." 

Strickland said Jain's description "turned on the light switch" for him about the benefit of testing being that positive cases can more quickly be isolated, with less opportunity to spread the virus to others. 

He made clear that he wouldn't recommend whether a school should reopen or not, but reiterated that pool testing provides another tool.  

"If you are going to open in person, whether full-time or part-time, this (pool testing) is another thing in addition to masking, washing your hands social distancing, that would make it safer (in schools)," Strickland said.  

Laura Testino covers education and children's issues for the Commercial Appeal. Reach her at laura.testino@commercialappeal.com or 901-512-3763. Find her on Twitter: @LDTestino