Calling for a review of the mass testing of healthy school children
Taking account of the best interests of young people must be a priority when considering any coronavirus measures introduced to schools - mass testing of healthy children is not in the best interests of our children.
The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health’s president, Dr Camilla Kingdon, has said, children should not have to “carry the burden” of the pandemic, going on to say, you are asking completely healthy children to test, with the potential to be excluded (from school), there is just a real concern that we are increasing a level of chaos into the system that is unnecessary,”
How many COVID cases have been prevented by testing asymptomatic children? Does this justify the harms of lost education, the psychological impact of isolation, the lost income for families when parents are forced to stay at home?
I was therefore pleased to be able to raise my own concerns about this policy with the Education Minister, Nadhim Zahawi.
Education Committee: Accountability hearings - November 3
Miriam Cates: It is very reassuring to hear your commitment to keeping schools open, but on the testing, many would argue, including me and the Royal College of Paediatricians, that testing is not an evidenced way of managing the pandemic. Rather than keeping schools open, it is sending many children home for long periods of time, during which time they are not receiving face-to-face education, and it is continuing to disrupt their education.
This is in the context of the vast majority of vulnerable people having been vaccinated and the vast majority of UK adults and an increasing number of 12 to 15 year-olds having antibodies. If we had said two years ago that we would test children twice a week for a disease that is not harmful to them and is no longer causing a mass problem in our population, and for them to know that, twice a week, they may be sent home from their friends and classes for two full weeks, we would have said that that was utterly ridiculous and very harmful.
We were supposed to have a review of the testing policy at the end of September, so I am just wondering where we are up to on that and what criteria you will be looking at to end this policy.
Nadhim Zahawi: Let me try to address that both as the Secretary of State for Education and as the previous Vaccines Minister. There are no easy options here. I hear what you say in terms of how young people would feel about testing positive and having to go home, but if we want to keep schools open, and children in education, we have to use the tools available to us.
As the Prime Minister said today, we have to remain humble to the virus. This thing is not over yet. We are transitioning it from pandemic to endemic status. We are not through that transition yet either, hence why the boosters are so important, because you want to protect the most vulnerable. When I took on the job of Vaccines Minister, I said that what the vaccines will do is reduce serious infection, hospitalisation and death by 90%, and they have done that.
If you have a local outbreak, the director of public health has a statutory responsibility to deal with it. If the levers available to them are things like wearing masks in communal areas and using daily lateral flow tests to keep children in school rather than asking them to isolate because they have come into contact with someone who has tested positive, that is a good place to be. I agree with you that it is not ideal, but it is a good place to be to keep education open.
Miriam Cates: How would you consider a move to maybe only testing people with symptoms? That would seem a more proportionate response, now that we have moved out of the acute phase of the pandemic.
Nadhim Zahawi: What directors of public health will say to you on this is that, to try to manage local outbreaks and keep education open, you need to test daily, because that is a better way of managing outbreaks. I go back and say to you that none of this is ideal. We are not living through normal times, but we are heading towards getting our lives and our freedoms back. We will probably be one of the first major economies in the world, because of the success of the vaccination programme that you have cited, that will demonstrate to the world how you transition this virus from pandemic to endemic status.