I hope so. They could legitimately use it if they're being returned to school before other people, but the numbers would be so high it would still have to be reserved for suspicion of symptomatic cases.
If they'r reopening schools at the same time as pubs, diners, etc, then those high school students are much lower risk than the general population, if not virtually immune like elementary school kids

I think puberty is a pretty big jump when it comes to transmitting it to other people. We shouldn't be very worried about too many kids succumbing to the illness. Obviously, that number could be several hundred dead nation wide but the greater risk is to the teachers. The seriousness of this begins to wane as treatment becomes better too.

Pretty much.

Testing isnt a cure and doesnt reduce spread so...

How does it not reduce spread? It allows us to identify quarantine candidates so that everyone else can go about their lives. One of the reasons why we had to shut down is because our testing strategy was complete horse shit.

No, we shut down because Democrats want to collapse the economy before an election. Sweden and Brazil never shut down and they have more or less the same results as us.

As far as the tests themselves, All of these measures have a cost and a success rate, false negatives, etc. Neither seem to be known let alone relevant. By the pure mathematics for example, the locking down never reduced spread. Masks reduced spread somewhat. Testing? Who even knows.

Young people getting the virus is also a good thing, idk why we arent encouraging spread amongst young people.

Similar to HIV, we don't know the long term effects. In addition, we're just not a healthy society to begin with. But hey, I think everyone is entitled to do what they want, just don't affect others. If you want to go to a COVID party and then hunker down for 4 weeks after, go for it.

But yes, testing does have false negatives. You're not going to 100% stop the spread but you can definitely mitigate it through testing. Better to catch 95% of the cases and let 5% get through than to fly blind.

Sweden did FAR worse than their Nordic counter parts. As a matter of fact, more people died per capita in Sweden than America (though we'll probably pass them). It'd be really cool if America was like the Nordic countries but we're a 3rd world country compared to them.

I imagine that Brazil, once it's all said and done, will be one of the worst countries. That place is a fucking shit hole.

New report from american academy of pediatrics. 1 in 100 teenagers get myocarditis after Covid.

Even if it isn't killing them, it's still dangerous and causing serious side effects.

The crux is the selection of test candidates. If we only test those cases where we suspect an infection based on symptoms, we're gonna miss all the presymptomatic spread. But various studies suggest that the infectiousness is highest on the day of symptom onset, or perhaps even the day before onset. Maybe someone has sources for the exact numbers, but from the top of my head, the WHO found around 40% of infections to be caused by presymptomatic transmission.

Those rapid tests would only be a game changer if we could use absurd amounts of them, the capacity of 50m tests per months cited in the politico article isnt nearly cutting it.

We can ration them though because there are still other tests available. We can look at places that are infection prone (i.e. high density areas). Places where cases are on the rise could be given priority so you can squash the spread before it gets out of hand. I agree that we need more more more. Back in March, I said that we'd probably need a billion tests.

40% presymptomatic sounds about right.

Yes, perhaps even more than that. If we could test all teachers and students, all nurses and doctors and caregivers in nursing homes and bus drivers, plus all the suspected cases based on symptoms, once per week with those rapid tests, we could squash the virus very quickly. That should sum up to something like 500m tests - per month.