are going to fight to get our kids back in in-person learning, period, full stop. we owe that to our children who suffered learning losses. reporter: the union wants students to be tested before returning to class. we re just wanting basic things. testing, that s what we re asking for. can we test every student before they come into the building. our district, for some reason, has been unable to do that. reporter: in washington i m very happy students are returning today. reporter: students were required to show proof of a negative test. just 5% tested positive. only one school forced to close. we have a few classrooms affected, but most importantly we ll have about 50,000 kids in d.c. public schools, another 50,000 in our public charter schools. reporter: and in new york city, surveillance testing in some 250 schools found a covid positivity rate among students of just over 1%.
and the glass half full perspective here given what we re seeing in the northeast and given what a doctor told us in the last hour, that wastewater in boston has gone down, the amount of coronavirus detected in wastewater has gone down significantly in the past few weeks. does that give you hope this is something we can see in other parts of the country relatively soon? yeah. i think so. i mean, just to cut to the chase, i think this is a cause for optimism here and those sort of broad surveillance testing like wastewater are really interesting because they give you sort of a broader view of what s happening in particular communities. but, you know, as we ve seen throughout this pandemic, this is a pretty heterogeneous country, so you tend to get these rolling waves of ups and downs around the country. if you look at the united states as a whole, sort of the left side of the country still, you know, significant increases overall in new cases over the past week compared to the week be
and the truth is we move forward, john, in this pandemic, and through this pandemic. we need effectively tools to help us understand what is going to happen before it happens. we need early indicators, we also need to look at later indicators. so right now waste water may be one of the tools. we know looking at proactive surveillance testing can help us well, understanding what is happening in emergency rooms in terms of surveillance, how many cases of covid-like illness are coming in, that could be useful and hospital sanizations and de. the bottom line is we re building more and more tools to help us figure out what the future may look like, and when to dial up or dial down precautions. that s going to be an important part of how we get through this pandemic and learn to live with this virus. saved by the waste water. who knew. doctor, tests to stay in schools is the change the administration advocated for, one things to
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