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Pennsylvania will offer voluntary COVID-19 testing in K-12 schools, state health and education officials announced Monday, promoting the effort as a way to keep the doors open for in-person learning amid a statewide resurgence of the coronavirus.
School districts will have to opt in, and parents must give consent to the weekly classroom testing, in which students' nasal swabs will be pooled and evaluated together to detect the presence of COVID-19 in a school building. The statewide program will be available to all schools, public and private, with the exception of Philadelphia, which runs its own COVID-19 testing program.
Boston-based Concentric by Ginkgo Bioworks, which operates school-based programs in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Arizona, North Carolina and other states, was awarded an $87 million contract to run Pennsylvania's program for the upcoming school year. The funds are coming from the state's share of the federal coronavirus relief bill.
"Early detection like this is exactly what we need to keep students in classrooms, and COVID out," Acting Health Secretary Alison Beam said at a news conference in Enola.
Ginkgo executive Karen Hogan said that testing "helps interrupt transmission cycles as early as possible." She called it a "nice, shallow swab" that most kids can administer themselves, with results available in one or two days.