March 23, 2022
The Honorable Richard Pan, Chair
Senate Health Committee
1021 O Street, Room 3310
Sacramento, CA 95814
Re: SB-1479 (COVID-19 testing in schools: COVID-19 testing plans) - OPPOSE
Dear Senator Pan:
We are writing as members and scientific advisors of California Parent Power, a grassroots network of parents advocating for sensible, data-driven policies for children, to express our opposition to Senate Bill 1479, which would require each school district in the state to participate in a COVID-19 testing program overseen by the state.
Routine testing of schoolchildren has not been shown to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Despite wide scale state testing programs for California schools during the 2021-2022 school year, California experienced an unprecedented surge in COVID-19 cases more than twice as large as the surge in the winter of 2020. According to the New York Times, California students missed more days of school in January 2022 than students in Arizona, Florida and Texas. Multiple states abandoned their school test-and-trace programs during Omicron for these reasons.
Testing of children for COVID-19 also provides no individual benefit, as treatment for children with COVID-19 does not differ from other common seasonal respiratory viruses. During the middle of the 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic, the CDC also stopped testing for H1N1 “because the test results do not change how you are treated.”
COVID-19 tests continue to be misunderstood and misused. Molecular RT-PCR testing is still the primary method of testing for COVID-19, but it is extremely sensitive and often identifies non-infectious individuals as positive weeks or months after recovery. In times of low viral prevalence, testing is also more likely to produce false positive results with antigen or PCR tests. With RT-PCR, countless students will continue to “test positive” long after an infection and be needlessly excluded from in-person school, sports and other extracurricular activities. This will exacerbate pandemic learning and schools will continue to lose millions in funding from the decreased average daily attendance (ADA) numbers as students miss days or weeks of in-person instruction.
Furthermore, expanding these testing programs to teachers and staff members will once again place an enormous strain on school staffing, as schools will continuously struggle to find substitute teachers, bus drivers and cafeteria workers on a seasonal basis with no clinical benefit. These measures already overwhelmed many school districts this past winter.
Resources expended on this program created by this bill could be better spent on the core mission of schools, particularly given the enormous education and mental health impacts children will be dealing with for years to come. Given the inevitability of spread regardless of testing intervals, devoting resources to improved indoor ventilation may be more productive with additional benefits beyond COVID-19 mitigation.
Finally, we also note this bill lacks any sunset provision. This new testing regime would exist in perpetuity, even after COVID-19 has clearly reached endemic status.
For these reasons, we urge committee members to vote “no” on SB 1479.
Sincerely,
Tracy Beth Hoeg MD, PhD
Dr. Hoeg is a physician-scientist affiliated with the University of California-Davis. As an Epidemiologist, her academic focus of late has been on COVID transmission in schools and risk benefit analysis of COVID vaccination in adolescents. She is the mother of 4 children.
Ram Duriseti MD, PhD
Dr. Duriseti is a physician-scientist who practices Emergency Medicine with a focus in Pediatric Emergency Medicine at Stanford Health and General Emergency Medicine in Sutter Health. His doctoral background is in statistical computing and computational modeling of complex decisions. He is the father of 3 children.
Jeanne Noble, MD, MA
Dr. Noble is Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), and Director of COVID Response for the UCSF Parnassus Emergency Department.