Recently, the information coming from the state of Vermont is dizzying.
A Friday night, January 7, email from the Agency of Education eliminating contact tracing and surveillance PCR tests was leaked to Seven Days which broke the story.
Fast forward to Monday when the Department of Health acknowledges that there’s an issue with people getting PCR results from January 6-8 and provides a way for people to email seeking results after the phone system fails and hangs up on people all day. Kudos to the Department of Health people who acknowledged this and then those who actual emailed people well into the evening with links to test results.
On to Tuesday where Governor Scott and others explained the reasoning for the change in education guidelines as well as the snafu that crashed the state’s testing and reporting system. Regarding the new education guidelines, rapid testing makes sense for a lot of reasons, but those reasons disappear when there aren’t enough tests.
What we heard on Tuesday was inconsistent. The AOE email from Friday night said unvaccinated kids whose classmates test positive for COVID would receive five days’ worth of rapid tests and continue to come to school as long as they test negative. On Tuesday we heard that unvaccinated and vaccinated kids could receive tests. Vermont Health Commissioner Dr. Mark Levine said vaccinated students can have access to the tests if they want.
But where are all these tests? On Tuesday we heard that schools could order them. Is that happening? Are they for vaxxed or unvaxxed students and staff?
On Wednesday the state rolled out its free COVID test registration whereby people can sign up to receive two boxes of rapid tests (four tests total). There were 350,000 tests or 175,000 boxes of tests available and it is likely they were all claimed by the end of the day.
This is a pilot program and hopefully it will be expanded so that all of us can have reliable access to the rapid tests we need. To suggest, as happened at the press conference, that those not affiliated with a school community should simply purchase tests online or in pharmacies fails to acknowledge that not everyone has the time or the money to search for tests.
