Sixteen Santa Maria High School Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) students joined 2,000 other students for competitive events and lectures at the FBLA Gold Coast Section Conference on Apr. 27 to Apr. 30 in Sacramento.
By City News Service
Apr 7, 2021
LOS ANGELES (CNS) - Rapid COVID-19 tests used twice a week could detect the most contagious children and help to make school re-openings safer, according to a study released today by USC.
“Serial testing is critical because one-time antigen tests might not identify asymptomatic children at or shortly after the onset of infection, said Neeraj Sood, who directs the COVID Initiative at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. “But serial testing will likely identify these children as they subsequently develop high viral loads and become infectious a few days later.
Researchers launched their study at a walk-up testing site in Los Angeles County during the winter surge in coronavirus cases, with 774 children between the ages of 5 and 17 being tested once with a rapid antigen test and once with a PCR test to confirm the results of the rapid test.
The study showed that the rapid, inexpensive and easy-to-use antigen tests have very low false positive rates but a moderately high false negative rate that did occasionally identify someone as negative who in fact had COVID-19, researchers said. The good news is that the false negative rate is low in kids likely to be infectious, as measured by viral load, said Sood, who is also a professor of health policy, preventive medicine and business and the vice dean of research at the USC Price School of Public Policy. Serial rapid testing may help compensate for missing the virus in the earliest stage of infection.