It's tough to get a child tested for coronavirus—and that's a problem

Coronavirus rates among kids have been rising fast, but we may not even know the half of it—because it turns out, it’s very difficult to get children tested for COVID-19 at all. Testing sites at Walgreens don't take kids at all, while the ones at CVS are only now dropping their minimum age from 16 to 12. Policies at many city- and state-run testing sites are similar.

“Having a blind spot makes you not able to respond from a public health perspective, either with the correct messaging or with the right policies to put into place to protect the people who are vulnerable,” Nir Menachemi, a professor of health policy and management at Indiana University, told The New York Times.

Washington, D.C. decided that since children in the District have nearly universal health coverage, they could get tested at their pediatricians’ offices, meaning free testing sites didn’t need to take children. But parents are finding that many pediatricians don’t actually offer the tests. In Dallas, the minimum age for testing is 5-years-old. In San Francisco, it’s 13—and that’s new. In Florida, drive-through testing sites have a minimum age of 5 and only a quarter of the state’s 60 state-supported sites take kids of all ages, Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz report.

With kids in many parts of the country already back in school, or starting the school year, testing kids matters enormously. Not testing kids is a great way to follow the Trumpian ethos that if there’s no positive test, there’s no COVID-19, but reality disagrees. Scientists have had trouble coming to a consensus on how likely children are to be infected or to spread coronavirus, and if the data is lacking, it’s going to be that much more difficult to figure out what’s going on. With many schools open, and students potentially in a position either to spread the virus to their classmates and teachers or to bring it home to their families, testing young people is critically important.

The lack of widespread testing of children is just one more Trump-owned failure in the spread of this pandemic.

from Daily Kos https://ift.tt/2GF5grO